Blinding in tDCS Studies: Correct End-of-Study Guess Does Not Moderate the Effects on Associative and Working Memory

Abstract

Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) has become a valuable tool in cognitive neuroscience research as it enables causal inferences about neural underpinnings of cognition. However, studies using tDCS to modulate cognitive functions often yield inconsistent findings. Hence, there is an increasing interest in factors that may moderate the effects, one of which is the participants’ beliefs of the tDCS condition (i.e., real or sham) they received. Namely, whether participants’ correct guessing of sham condition may lead to false-positive tDCS effects. In this study, we aimed to explore if participants’ beliefs about received stimulation type (i.e., the success of blinding) impacted their task performance in tDCS experiments on associative (AM) and working memory (WM). We analyzed data from four within-subject, sham-controlled tDCS memory experiments (N = 83) to check if the correct end-of-study guess of sham condition moderated tDCS effects. We found no evidence that sham guessing moderated post-tDCS memory performance in experiments in which tDCS effects were observed as well as in experiments that showed null effects of tDCS. The results suggest that the correct sham guessing (i.e., placebo-like effect) is unlikely to influence the results in tDCS memory experiments. We discuss the results in light of the growing debate about the relevance and effectiveness of blinding in brain stimulation research.