Schedule of Events | Symposia

Causal fractionation of the contribution of the prefrontal cortex to cognitive control

Poster Session A - Saturday, March 29, 2025, 3:00 – 5:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Jongmin Lee¹ (jongmin.lee.529@gmail.com), Alexandria Meyer¹, Keri Anne Gladhill¹, Anabel Dorfman¹, Sadie Gould¹, Derek Evan Nee¹; ¹Florida State University

Cognitive control enables flexible and goal-directed behavior by overriding habitual responses. The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is crucial for cognitive control. Substantial research indicates that distinct cognitive control demands engage distinct PFC sub-regions supporting functional differentiation. However, causal, mechanistic evidence for the specific contribution of different PFC sub-regions to control processes remains limited. To resolve this issue, in different sessions, we separately targeted the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), lateral frontopolar cortex (FPl), or a control site (primary somatosensory cortex; S1) with intermittent theta burst transcranial magnetic stimulation (iTBS), an excitatory stimulation protocol. The DLPFC and FPl were targeted due to their theoretical prominence for cognitive control and simultaneous engagement in the same cognitive control conditions. PFC targets were individually-localized based upon fMRI activations using the same task contrast. Following iTBS, participants were once again scanned with fMRI while performing a comprehensive control task that dissociates multiple forms of control. Among the control processes studied was contextual control, the ability to flexibly select context-appropriate task sets, which underlies multi-tasking and task-switching. We found that DLPFC-iTBS selectively enhanced contextual control compared to FPl-iTBS and control conditions (no-iTBS, S1-iTBS) evidenced by significantly reduced mixing costs and numerically reduced switching costs. These behavioral improvements were accompanied by reduced BOLD activation across the lateral PFC suggesting that DLPFC-iTBS improved neurocognitive efficiency. Taken together, the dissociation between the effects of DLPFC- and FPl-iTBS suggests that the DLPFC is particularly important for neurocognitive efficiency. Furthermore, these dissociations underscore the importance of pairing correlative techniques (fMRI) with causal techniques.

Topic Area: EXECUTIVE PROCESSES: Goal maintenance & switching