Acetylcholinergic Drug enhances attention at different dose as cognitive flexibility

Acetylcholinergic Drug enhances attention at different dose as cognitive flexibility
We tested how a cholinergic drug that is used to treat symptoms of dementia (donepezil, Arizept) affects cognitive abilities across multiple domains in monkeys. We found that donepezil showed stunning improvements of attentional filtering (less distraction) during visual search but at a different dose at it enhanced flexible learning of attention sets. See our paper Hassaniet al. (2023). Dose-dependent dissociation of pro-cognitive effects of donepezil on attention and cognitive flexibility in rhesus monkeys. Biological Psychiatry GOS. 3(1), p.68-77

Related News

Effective Connectivity Shows Asymmetries in Resonance and Latencies between Medial and Lateral Prefrontal Cortex Connections

The lab has a first article published about the strength, latency and resonance patterns of connections between the anterior cingulate cortex and lateral prefrontal cortex of the macaque. This work was led by postdoc Veronica Nacher and is published in Brain Structure and Function. The paper identifies a novel electrical microstimulation protocol that can be […]

Striatum interneurons track learning of attention cues

Our new paper shows how fast spiking interneurons in the striatum activate specifically when attention cues are learned. This is a rare paper where we succeed to isolate fast spiking interneurons in recordings from nonhuman primate anterior striatum while the animals performed a complex feature-based attentional learning task. Phd can. Kia Banaeie Boroujeni spearheaded the […]

Computational Properties of Prefrontal Cortex – Workshop

We hosted a superb 2018 CPPC (Computational Properties of Prefrontal Cortex) Workshop at Vanderbilt. The workshop attracted more than 60 emerging and established (neuro-)scientists about how the prefrontal cortex works – See the program and more at the www link CPPC2018. This year had special sessions on value-based decision making and uncertainty, social cognition, functional […]