Ljubojevic V, Botly L, De Rosa E (2012) Cholinergic contributions to learned attentional suppression in the rat with touchscreens. Neuroscience 2012 Abstracts 729.13. Society for Neuroscience, New Orleans, LA.
Summary: One of the tasks of the attentional system is to filter environmental input according to its behavioral relevance. The neuromodulator acetylcholine (ACh) is thought to play a role in this process because of its ability to boost the signal-to-noise ratio of incoming sensory information. Cholinergic innervation of the attentional system has been shown to be necessary for successful selection of behaviorally-relevant stimuli (signal). However, it is not yet clear if ACh also plays a part in the attentional suppression of behaviorally-irrelevant information (noise). Thus, we examined the effect of cortical cholinergic deafferentation on attentional suppression in rats. To measure attentional suppression, we used a rat analog of the learning-to-ignore (LI) task originally designed for human participants (Dixon et al., 2009). The paradigm consisted of three stages of training (Prime1, Prime2, Probe; 10 sessions per stage), each of which involved stages of visual simultaneous discriminations between two stimuli. In both Prime conditions, individuals learned to respond to target stimuli (A+ and then C+ respectively), while ignoring the same distractor stimulus (B-). During Probe, the previously ignored stimulus became the target (B+) and a novel stimulus (D-) was introduced as a distractor. Eighteen male Long-Evans rats were trained to perform the touchscreen-based LI task. Like the human data, a behavioral decrement (lower accuracy) was observed during the Probe phase of the LI task when compared to Prime 1 and 2, which suggests that the ignored distractor stimulus was suppressed during Prime. We hypothesized that administration of the ACh-specific immunotoxin, 192 IgG-saporin, into the nucleus basalis magnocellularis (NBM) would lead to better performance during Probe condition relative to controls. Accordingly, the rats were subjected to either cholinergic immunotoxic (SAP, N=10) or sham lesion surgery (SHAM, N=8). After 2 weeks of post-surgical recovery, the rats were tested on the LI task with a new stimulus set. The two groups performed comparably during Prime1 and 2, with both SAP and SHAM rats successfully learning the discriminations. As predicted, during Probe SAP rats exhibited significantly less behavioral decrement than controls. Histological analysis revealed that the lesion was chemically and anatomically specific to cholinergic cells in the NBM. This counterintuitive finding suggests that the improved performance during Probe, due to reduced ACh input to the neocortex, was due to inefficient attentional suppression of the behaviorally-irrelevant stimulus.
Related Products: 192-IgG-SAP (Cat. #IT-01)