Modulation of neural activity in frontopolar cortex drives reward-based motor learning

Abstract

Decision-making is increasingly being recognised to play a role in learning motor skills. Understanding the neural processes regulating motor decision-making is therefore essential to identify mechanisms that contribute to motor skill learning. In decision-making tasks, the frontopolar cortex (FPC) is involved in tracking the reward of different alternative choices, as well as their reliability. Whether this FPC function extends to reward landscapes associated with a continuous movement dimension remains unknown. Here we used anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over the right FPC to investigate its role in reward-based motor learning. Nineteen healthy human participants completed a motor sequence learning task using trial-wise reward feedback to discover a hidden performance goal along a continuous dimension: timing. As a control condition, we modulated contralateral motor cortex (left M1) activity with tDCS, which has been shown to benefit motor skill learning but less consistently reward-based motor learning. Each active tDCS condition was contrasted to sham stimulation. Right FPC-tDCS led to faster learning primarily through a regulation of exploration, without concurrent modulation of motor noise. A Bayesian computational model revealed that following rFPC-tDCS, participants had a higher expectation of reward, consistent with their faster learning. These higher reward estimates were inferred to be less volatile, and thus participants under rFPC-tDCS deemed the mapping between movement and reward to be more stable. Relative to sham, lM1-tDCS did not significantly modulate main behavioral outcomes. The results indicate that brain regions previously linked to decision-making, such as the FPC, are relevant for motor skill learning.