Inhibiting the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex selectively enhances unsupervised statistical learning.

Inhibiting the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex enhances unsupervised statistical learning in adults by 95 participants.

• Why it matters: Understanding hemispheric contributions of the DLPFC is crucial for revealing how the brain balances automatic regularity extraction with cognitive control, which has implications for learning and decision-making processes.
• What they did: Researchers applied inhibitory repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation to the left, right, or bilateral DLPFC during a probabilistic sequence learning task, involving 95 adults, to assess effects on learning and memory.
• The result: Inhibiting the right and bilateral DLPFC improved statistical learning without affecting episodic memory, suggesting a shift toward an exploratory information-sampling strategy linked to increased reaction time variability.