Sahereh Varastegan¹, Weiwei Zhang²; ¹Ph.D. Student at University of California, Riverside, ²Professor of Psychology at University of California, Riverside

Dynamic attentional mechanisms play a critical role in goal-directed behavior by filtering and prioritizing relevant information for further processing, such as working memory encoding. However, during Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP), these processes may falter, resulting in what is known as the attentional blink. Recent evidence has linked this phenomenon to alpha oscillations within the frontoparietal network which are important for top-down attentional control and working memory encoding. Specifically, reduced alpha synchronization is associated with increased attentional blink. It is thus hypothesized that neuromodulation of alpha activity via tACS would impact the magnitude of the attentional blink . The present study investigated how 10 Hz transcranial Alternating Current Stimulation (tACS) over the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) influences attentional blink. While performing the attentional blink task with RSVP of two letter targets among distractor digits, participants received 20 to 25 minutes of 10 Hz tACS at an intensity of 2mA versus a sham stimulation condition (30 seconds of stimulation including a 10-second fade-in/fade-out periods). It was predicted that the active stimulation should reduce attentional blink magnitude at lag 3, but not at lag 1 or 7. Contrary to this prediction, a repeated-measures ANOVA revealed significant main effects of stimulation condition (active vs. sham) and lag (lags 1, 3, and 7) but no significant interaction effect. Overall, the results demonstrated that alpha tACS improved performance on the AB task across all lags. This improvement may reflect reduced working memory demands associated with maintaining the first target (T1), thereby facilitating the processing of the second target (T2).