Deception rate in a “lying game”: Different effects of excitatory repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation of right and left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex not found with inhibitory stimulation

•Left-DLPFC excitation by TMS compared to right-DLPFC excitation decreases lying.•Excitation protocol of TMS is more systematic compared with the inhibition protocol.•Right hemisphere is more susceptible to opposite effects of stimulation types compared with the left-hemisphere effects. Knowing the brain processes involved in lying is the key point in today's deception detection studies. We have previously found that stimulating the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) with repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) affects the rate of spontaneous lying in simple behavioural tasks. The main idea of this study was to examine the role of rTMS applied to the DLPFC in the behavioural conditions where subjects were better motivated to lie compared to our earlier studies and where all possible conditions (inhibition of left and right DLPFC with 1-Hz and sham; excitation of left and right DLPFC with 10-Hz and sham) were administered to the same subjects. It was expected that excitation of the left DLPFC with rTMS decreases and excitation of the right DLPFC increases the rate of lying and that inhibitory stimulation reverses the effects. As was expected, excitation of the left DLPFC decreased lying compared to excitation of the right DLPFC, but contrary to the expectation, inhibition had no different effects. These findings suggest that propensity to lie can be manipulated by non-invasive excitatory brain stimulation by TMS targeted at DLPFC and the direction of the effect depends on the cortical target locus.