Role of neurotransmitter dopamine and acetylcholine during the interaction of selective attention and working memory
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1
Department for Neurology, University of Magdeburg, Germany
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2
Leibnitz-Institute for Neurobiology, Germany
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3
German Centre for Neurodegenerative Diseases, Germany
Our capacity to store information in visual working memory is limited and varies considerably across individuals (Luck & Vogel, 1997). Recent studies indicate that subjects with low memory capacity are not sufficiently able to ignore task irrelevant information. Instead they seem to store this information additionally in memory (McNab & Klingberg, 2008; Vogel et al., 2005). A direct proof of this assumption, however, has not been made yet, because none of these studies verified the memory performance for irrelevant stimuli. In this work we show for the first time, that irrelevant stimuli which implicate a different response than the relevant, lead to an increased error rate and longer reaction times in subjects with low memory capacity. This was demonstrated by applying a delayed match-to-sample-task (DMS), which allowed distinguishing between answers to relevant (hits) and answers to irrelevant (shams) stimuli. Furthermore, we investigated how attentional selection and storage in working memory are influenced by pharmacological modulation of neurotransmitter levels. One group of subjects received either Galantamine or placebo while they performed the DMS task, the other group L-Dopa or placebo. We found that working memory storage is rather dopamine-dependent, whereas selective attention depends on the acetylcholine level. These effects were also influenced by the individual memory capacity. We also studied the drug effects on fMRI signals in prefrontal areas during preparatory attentional selection and in parietal cortex during memory storage. The results of this study contribute to the understanding of individual differences in working memory capacity.
Keywords:
fMRI,
memory and learning
Conference:
XI International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON XI), Palma, Mallorca, Spain, 25 Sep - 29 Sep, 2011.
Presentation Type:
Poster Presentation
Topic:
Poster Sessions: Neural Bases of Memory and Learning
Citation:
Vellage
A,
Becke
A,
Strumpf
H,
Hopf
J and
Müller
N
(2011). Role of neurotransmitter dopamine and acetylcholine during the interaction of selective attention and working memory.
Conference Abstract:
XI International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON XI).
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2011.207.00211
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Received:
21 Nov 2011;
Published Online:
28 Nov 2011.
*
Correspondence:
Dr. Anne Vellage, Department for Neurology, University of Magdeburg, Magdeburg, Germany, a.vellage@gmx.de