Abstract
Attention is critical to high-level cognition, and attentional deficits are a hallmark of cognitive dysfunction. A key transmitter for attentional control is acetylcholine, but its cellular actions in attention-controlling areas remain poorly understood. Here we delineate how muscarinic and nicotinic receptors affect basic neuronal excitability and attentional control signals in different cell types in macaque frontal eye field. We found that broad spiking and narrow spiking cells both require muscarinic and nicotinic receptors for normal excitability, thereby affecting ongoing or stimulus-driven activity. Attentional control signals depended on muscarinic, not nicotinic receptors in broad spiking cells, while they depended on both muscarinic and nicotinic receptors in narrow spiking cells. Cluster analysis revealed that muscarinic and nicotinic effects on attentional control signals were highly selective even for different subclasses of narrow spiking cells and of broad spiking cells. These results demonstrate that cholinergic receptors are critical to establish attentional control signals in the frontal eye field in a cell type-specific manner.
Highlights
Attention is critical to high-level cognition, and attentional deficits are a hallmark of cognitive dysfunction
We show that acetylcholine promotes attentional signals in frontal cortex by differentially activating 2 cholinergic receptor types in different cell groups
Muscarinic receptor activation in broad and narrow spiking cells contributes to attentional modulation of firing rates, while nicotinic receptors contribute to attentional modulation only in narrow spiking, but not in broad spiking cells
Summary
Attention is critical to high-level cognition, and attentional deficits are a hallmark of cognitive dysfunction. Cluster analysis revealed that muscarinic and nicotinic effects on attentional control signals were highly selective even for different subclasses of narrow spiking cells and of broad spiking cells. Cellular signatures of attention include increased firing rates [5, 6], reduced rate variability [7,8,9], reduced noise correlation [8,9,10,11], and altered oscillatory activity [12,13,14] These modulations are driven by cortico-cortical feedback connections [15, 16], and one of the key areas mediating these effects is the frontal eye field (FEF) [14,15,16,17,18,19]. Our data reveal a cell type-specific contribution of cholinergic receptors to attentional signals in primate frontal cortex
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