During the task, participants were presented with a coloured (red or green) or achromatic grapheme, which acted as a congruent, incongruent, or neutral condition (achromatic grapheme trials). After participants had read the grapheme aloud, they were presented

with three coloured diamonds (either red click here or green) each missing either the left or the right side (Fig. 1a). Two of the diamonds were the same colour and one was odd. The participants’ task was to indicate which side of the odd coloured diamond was missing. Stimulation was delivered via a figure of eight coil with a 70 mm diameter using a Magstim Super Rapid Stimulator (Magstim, UK). An offline cTBS paradigm was used (see Banissy et al., 2010 for TMS parameters). Locations for cTBS were identified using Brainsight TMS-magnetic resonance coregistration system (Rogue Research, Montreal, Canada). The left V4 site was selected based on coordinates from neurologically normal participants in an functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study investigating colour perception (36, −56, −14; Morita et al., 2004). The coordinates

for V5/MT (44, −67, 0) were the averages of neurologically normal participants in an fMRI study of motion processing and were confirmed functionally through phosephenes (Dumoulin et al., 2000). The vertex was identified as the point midway between the inion and the nasion, equidistant from the left and right intertragal notches. As per previous perceptual priming studies (Walsh et al., 2000, Campana LY2835219 cell line et al., 2002, Kristjánsson et al., 2005 and Kristjánsson et al., 2007), we expected participants Suplatast tosilate to respond faster to the odd coloured diamond when this was congruent with the prime grapheme. This was found to be the case in all baseline conditions [V4 group: t(5) = 3.07, p = .028; V5/MT group: t(5) = 2.94, p = .032; Vertex group: t(5) = 4.67, p = .005]

and the size of the priming effect (i.e., incongruent stimulus median reaction time minus congruent stimulus median reaction time) was similar across sites [F(2, 15) = 1.70, p = .216]. To examine the effects of cTBS on priming, we firstly compared the size of the colour priming effect (incongruent reaction time minus congruent reaction time) in the baseline condition with the size of the colour priming effect following cTBS to each site separately by using paired t-tests. This revealed that cTBS to V4 [t(5) = 4.59, p ≤ .01], but not MT/V5 [t(5) = .446, p = 0.67] or the vertex [t(5) = .174, p = 0.87], reduced colour priming. To ensure that this effect was not due to ceiling effects in reaction time or accuracy following V4 stimulation we also compared accuracy and overall reaction time performances at baseline and following cTBS in the V4 group. This revealed no significant effect on accuracy performance [t(5) = .349, p = .741]. There was a significant facilitation of overall reaction times following V4 stimulation [Baseline mean ± s.e.m = 612 ± 38.81; V4 TMS mean ± s.e.m = 565.