, 2010). In Boyd and Linsdell’s study, excitatory rTMS (15 min of 5-Hz rTMS at 120% RMT) was applied over the left dPM before participants used their right arm to practice a continuous tracking task. The authors found that excitatory rTMS over dPM enhanced memory consolidation as indicated by off-line learning. We used a different approach by applying inhibitory rTMS (10 min of 1-Hz rTMS at 110% RMT) to dPM after practice. We found that memory consolidation, indexed

by forgetting, was impaired in those who practiced the task under the dual-task condition. However, in comparing the Control–NoTMS and Control–dPM groups, we found that rTMS applied over dPM after single-task practice did not seem to have an effect on forgetting. This BIRB 796 suggests that the role of dPM in memory consolidation may be meditated by the practice condition. Previous studies have demonstrated

that the involvement of M1 (Kantak et al., 2010b), dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex (Kantak et al., 2010b) and supplementary motor area (Tanaka et al., 2010) in memory consolidation depends selleck compound on practice structure. Therefore, the engagement of dPM during memory consolidation may also depend on the structure in which the task is practiced. A key limitation of the current study is that we did not capture participants’ brain activation during practice. The selection of neural substrate hypothesised to mediate the dual task motor learning benefit was based on evidence supporting the role of check dPM in ‘planning’ processes. A more robust design would be a combined approach in which fMRI or PET is used to identify the ‘shared neural networks’ during practice and then TMS perturbation

of the observed neural activation immediately follows practice. Second, we did not have individual brain structural MRI scans for all participants in the dPM groups. Participants without brain scans only made up a small percentage of our sample (five out of 20) and their movement times were not different from those with scans. The third limitation of the present study is that the Control–dPM group demonstrated the shortest movement time throughout the experiment (both practice and retention), even before they received rTMS application. The group had similar characteristics (age, gender) as other groups; we could not find a satisfactory explanation for this difference. Nevertheless, our primary comparison was on the measure of forgetting in which participants’ retention performance rather than practice performance was referenced to their end-of-practice performance. Thus, the difference in the Control–dPM group is not an issue for our overall conclusion. Another limitation was that we only examined the ‘planning’ processes in the present study.