The role of the dorsal medial frontal cortex in central processing limitation: a transcranial magnetic stimulation study

When humans perform two tasks simultaneously, responses to the second task are increasingly delayed as the interval between the two tasks decreases (psychological refractory period). This delay of the second task is thought to reflect a central processing limitation at the response selection stage. However, the neural mechanisms underlying this central processing limitation remain unclear. Using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), we examined the role of the dorsal medial frontal cortex (dMFC) in a dual-task paradigm in which participants performed an auditory task 1 and a visual task 2. We found that dMFC TMS, relative to control conditions, reduced the psychological refractory period for task 2 processing, whereas we observed no dMFC TMS effects on task 1 processing. This suggests a causal role of the dMFC in coordinating response selection processes at the central bottleneck.