Acetylcholine, Dopamine, and Glutamate measured in three brain areas with a new SPME-probe

Our new paper shows reliable Multi-Neuromodulator measurements in the awake nonhuman primate in prefrontal cortex, premotor cortex and the basal ganglia using a new chemical sensing probe. The probe uses principles of Solid-Phase-Microextraction and is a development by the SPME pioneer and collaborator Prof. Janusz Pawliszyn from the University of Waterloo. The paper can be downloaded here.

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First Neuropharmacological Contribution

Congratulations to Ali and Mariann for the first neuropharmacological contribution from our laboratory with the article A computational psychiatry approach identifies how alpha-2A noradrenergic agonist Guanfacine affects feature-based reinforcement learning in the macaque . This study first surveys all 14 different tasks that have ever been used with Guanfacine in nonhuman primate studies and than […]

The phase of firing of fronto-striatal neurons encodes learning variables

Our new paper shows that neurons in the striatum, anterior cingulate and prefrontal cortex encode learning variables in the phase of firing. We outline a powerful regression based analysis pipeline that revealed spiking activity of neurons relative to the phase of beta oscillations carries significant learning information during reversal learning. The paper can be downloaded […]

M1-selective allosteric modulation enhances cognitive flexibility

We have new research out at PNAS about enhancing cognitive flexibility with highly selective allosteric modulation of the M1 muscarinic receptor (pdf: here)! Muscarinic receptors are known to mediate pro-cognitive effects of acetylcholine, but it has remained unclear whether they differentially affect the cognitive subfunctions of attentional filtering, set shifting, and learning. To clarify the […]