Serotonergic modulation of cognition; An acute challenge

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Serotonin is well known to affect the multifaceted construct of impulsivity. Lowering brain serotonin levels is shown to increase impulsive choice in delay-discounting tasks (1) but improves response inhibition in stop-signal paradigms. (2) Administration of the antidepressant citalopram in healthy people increases tendency to perform go choices in a Go/No-Go task independent of outcome valence (3). It is rather unclear thought how serotonergic neurotransmission affects several aspects of cognition. We administered a single dose of 20mg escitalopram, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, to 66 healthy participants, aged 18–45 years old, in a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled, parallel-groups study. Acute escitalopram administration had a beneficial effect on inhibitory control with reduced stop-signal reaction time observed in the treatment group. Participants made significantly more errors in a probabilistic learning task and had lower accuracy during the discrimination stage in an instrumental learning task thus indicating a learning impairment. More errors in the CANTAB intra-extra dimensional set shift task were also observed in the escitalopram-treated group. Our findings following acute administration of a clinically relevant dose of escitalopram show a dissociate role for serotonin in modulating cognition mediated by a potentially differential modulation of fronto-striatal loops.