Abstract
Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) is proposed to drive brain-wide focus by biasing processing in favour of task-relevant information. A longstanding debate concerns whether this is achieved through enhancing processing of relevant information and/or by inhibiting irrelevant information. To address this, we applied transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) during fMRI, and tested for causal changes in information coding. Participants attended to one feature, whilst ignoring another feature, of a visual object. If dlPFC is necessary for facilitation, disruptive TMS should decrease coding of attended features. Conversely, if dlPFC is crucial for inhibition, TMS should increase coding of ignored features. Here, we show that TMS decreases coding of relevant information across frontoparietal cortex, and the impact is significantly stronger than any effect on irrelevant information, which is not statistically detectable. This provides causal evidence for a specific role of dlPFC in enhancing task-relevant representations and demonstrates the cognitive-neural insights possible with concurrent TMS-fMRI-MVPA.
Highlights
Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is proposed to drive brain-wide focus by biasing processing in favour of task-relevant information
A final hypothesis (5) is that the right Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) has no role in supporting information processing, in which case we would expect no change in information coding with transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)
We used multivariate analyses of concurrent TMS-functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data to causally examine the role of right dlPFC in supporting attentional processing in the brain
Summary
Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) is proposed to drive brain-wide focus by biasing processing in favour of task-relevant information. Recent observations indicate that prefrontal neurons can be driven by nonlinear combinations of multiple task features, referred to as mixed selectivity[19,20], and that both relevant and irrelevant features, and task rules and decisions, can be coded by independent, dynamic patterns of activity across a neural population[21,22,23,24]. A network referred to as the multipledemand (MD) network[2], has been shown to encode a range of task features[25] with a strong preference for attended information over information that is irrelevant[26,27,28,29,30] This network includes the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), the anterior insula and frontal operculum (AI/FO), intraparietal sulcus (IPS) and the presupplementary motor area and adjacent anterior cingulate In the human brain we lack causal evidence relating dlPFC activity to the representation of information elsewhere
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