 Gatsby Computational
Neuroscience UnitAlexandra House, 17 Queen Square, LONDON, WC1N 3AR, UK, Tel: +44 (0) 20 7679 1176, Fax +44 (0) 20 7679 1173 abla@gatsby.ucl.ac.uk, www.gatsby.ucl.ac.uk ABSTRACTS Supported by The Gatsby Foundation |Index|Objective|Attendees|Programme|Travel information|Accommodation|
Cholinergic Modulation of Learning and Attention in the Human Brain:
Insights from Pharmacological fMRI Studies
The manipulation of neurotransmitter systems in
combination with cognitive tasks can be used to study the role of a
neurotransmitter in relation to particular behaviours. Pharmacological
challenges have been successfully used for decades in animal and man to
study the neurochemistry of behaviour and develop drugs to treat
impaired cognitive functions. In recent years, neuroimaging techniques
such as PET and fMRI have provided a mean of investigating cerebral
correlates of cognitive processes in the human brain. The combination of
pharmacological challenges with a cognitive tasks in the context of
neuroimaging is a powerful approach to directly assess pharmacological
modulation of task induced cerebral activations
The talk will introduce the combination of
fMRI and psychopharmacology as a tool to study neurochemical modulation
of human brain function (1,2). I will illustrate this approach with
studies on i) cholinergic modulation of conditioning-related responses
in auditory cortex which suggest that ACh can modulate early levels of
stimulus processing (3,4) and ii) cholinergic modulation of visuospatial
attention in a cued target detection task which indicate that nicotine
modulates parietal and frontal activity.
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