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Role of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in context‐dependent motor performance
Author(s) -
Lee Y.Y.,
Winstein C. J.,
Fisher B. E.
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
european journal of neuroscience
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.346
H-Index - 206
eISSN - 1460-9568
pISSN - 0953-816X
DOI - 10.1111/ejn.13178
Subject(s) - dorsolateral prefrontal cortex , transcranial magnetic stimulation , context (archaeology) , psychology , neuroscience , prefrontal cortex , stimulation , cognition , biology , paleontology
Context‐dependent motor performance is a phenomenon in which people perform better in the environmental context where they originally practised a task. Some animal and computer simulation studies have suggested that context‐dependent performance may be associated with neural activation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex ( DLPFC ). This study aimed to determine the role of the DLPFC in context‐dependent motor performance by perturbing the neural processing of the DLPFC with repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation ( rTMS ) in healthy adults. Thirty healthy adults were recruited into the Control, rTMS DLPFC and rTMS Vertex groups. The participants practised three finger sequences associated with a specific incidental context (a coloured circle and a location on the computer screen). One day following practice, the rTMS groups received 1 Hz rTMS prior to the testing conditions in which the sequence‐context associations remained the same as practice ( SAME ) or changed ( SWITCH ). All three groups improved significantly over practice on day 1. The second day testing results showed that the DLPFC group had a significantly lower decrease in motor performance under the SWITCH condition than the Control and Vertex groups. This finding suggests a specific role of the DLPFC in context‐dependent motor performance.