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Cholinergic Control of Visual Categorization in Macaques

Acetylcholine (ACh) is a neurotransmitter acting via muscarinic and nicotinic receptors that is implicated in several cognitive functions and impairments, such as Alzheimer’s disease. It is believed to especially affect the acquisition of new information, which is particularly important when behavio...

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Autores principales: Aggelopoulos, Nikolaos C., Liebe, Stefanie, Logothetis, Nikos K., Rainer, Gregor
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Research Foundation 2011
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3215973/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22110428
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2011.00073
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author Aggelopoulos, Nikolaos C.
Liebe, Stefanie
Logothetis, Nikos K.
Rainer, Gregor
author_facet Aggelopoulos, Nikolaos C.
Liebe, Stefanie
Logothetis, Nikos K.
Rainer, Gregor
author_sort Aggelopoulos, Nikolaos C.
collection PubMed
description Acetylcholine (ACh) is a neurotransmitter acting via muscarinic and nicotinic receptors that is implicated in several cognitive functions and impairments, such as Alzheimer’s disease. It is believed to especially affect the acquisition of new information, which is particularly important when behavior needs to be adapted to new situations and to novel sensory events. Categorization, the process of assigning stimuli to a category, is a cognitive function that also involves information acquisition. The role of ACh on categorization has not been previously studied. We have examined the effects of scopolamine, an antagonist of muscarinic ACh receptors, on visual categorization in macaque monkeys using familiar and novel stimuli. When the peripheral effects of scopolamine on the parasympathetic nervous system were controlled for, categorization performance was disrupted following systemic injections of scopolamine. This impairment was observed only when the stimuli that needed to be categorized had not been seen before. In other words, the monkeys were not impaired by the central action of scopolamine in categorizing a set of familiar stimuli (stimuli which they had categorized successfully in previous sessions). Categorization performance also deteriorated as the stimulus became less salient by an increase in the level of visual noise. However, scopolamine did not cause additional performance disruptions for difficult categorization judgments at lower coherence levels. Scopolamine, therefore, specifically affects the assignment of new exemplars to established cognitive categories, presumably by impairing the processing of novel information. Since we did not find an effect of scopolamine in the categorization of familiar stimuli, scopolamine had no significant central action on other cognitive functions such as perception, attention, memory, or executive control within the context of our categorization task.
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spelling pubmed-32159732011-11-21 Cholinergic Control of Visual Categorization in Macaques Aggelopoulos, Nikolaos C. Liebe, Stefanie Logothetis, Nikos K. Rainer, Gregor Front Behav Neurosci Neuroscience Acetylcholine (ACh) is a neurotransmitter acting via muscarinic and nicotinic receptors that is implicated in several cognitive functions and impairments, such as Alzheimer’s disease. It is believed to especially affect the acquisition of new information, which is particularly important when behavior needs to be adapted to new situations and to novel sensory events. Categorization, the process of assigning stimuli to a category, is a cognitive function that also involves information acquisition. The role of ACh on categorization has not been previously studied. We have examined the effects of scopolamine, an antagonist of muscarinic ACh receptors, on visual categorization in macaque monkeys using familiar and novel stimuli. When the peripheral effects of scopolamine on the parasympathetic nervous system were controlled for, categorization performance was disrupted following systemic injections of scopolamine. This impairment was observed only when the stimuli that needed to be categorized had not been seen before. In other words, the monkeys were not impaired by the central action of scopolamine in categorizing a set of familiar stimuli (stimuli which they had categorized successfully in previous sessions). Categorization performance also deteriorated as the stimulus became less salient by an increase in the level of visual noise. However, scopolamine did not cause additional performance disruptions for difficult categorization judgments at lower coherence levels. Scopolamine, therefore, specifically affects the assignment of new exemplars to established cognitive categories, presumably by impairing the processing of novel information. Since we did not find an effect of scopolamine in the categorization of familiar stimuli, scopolamine had no significant central action on other cognitive functions such as perception, attention, memory, or executive control within the context of our categorization task. Frontiers Research Foundation 2011-11-15 /pmc/articles/PMC3215973/ /pubmed/22110428 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2011.00073 Text en Copyright © 2011 Aggelopoulos, Liebe, Logothetis and Rainer. http://www.frontiersin.org/licenseagreement This is an open-access article subject to a non-exclusive license between the authors and Frontiers Media SA, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in other forums, provided the original authors and source are credited and other Frontiers conditions are complied with.
spellingShingle Neuroscience
Aggelopoulos, Nikolaos C.
Liebe, Stefanie
Logothetis, Nikos K.
Rainer, Gregor
Cholinergic Control of Visual Categorization in Macaques
title Cholinergic Control of Visual Categorization in Macaques
title_full Cholinergic Control of Visual Categorization in Macaques
title_fullStr Cholinergic Control of Visual Categorization in Macaques
title_full_unstemmed Cholinergic Control of Visual Categorization in Macaques
title_short Cholinergic Control of Visual Categorization in Macaques
title_sort cholinergic control of visual categorization in macaques
topic Neuroscience
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3215973/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22110428
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2011.00073
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