title: Role of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in context-dependent motor performance.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Division of Biokinesiology and Physical Therapy, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, 90089, USA.|School and Graduate Institute of Physical Therapy, College of Medicine, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan.
authors.forename: Y-Y
authors.initials: YY
authors.lastname: Lee
authors.affiliation: Division of Biokinesiology and Physical Therapy, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, 90089, USA.
authors.forename: C J
authors.initials: CJ
authors.lastname: Winstein
authors.affiliation: Division of Biokinesiology and Physical Therapy, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, 90089, USA.|Department of Neurology, Division for Movement Disorders, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, 90089, USA.
authors.forename: B E
authors.initials: BE
authors.lastname: Fisher
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D001244:Association; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D017397:Prefrontal Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D011597:Psychomotor Performance; D050781:Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation
keywords: context; frontostriatal circuit; human; learning; sequence; transcranial magnetic stimulation