Role of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in context‐dependent motor performance

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.