Cholinergic influences on the encoding, but not retrieval, of crossmodal sensory feature binding in rats.
Published: 2005
Language: eng
Number of pages: 98
Description: The binding problem refers to the question of how the brain integrates sensory information registered by multiple brain regions to form a unified representation of a stimulus. Both human and nonhuman studies have suggested a modulatory role for the muscarinic cholinergic system in feature binding. However, such research has been limited to binding within single sensory modalities. We hypothesize that acetylcholine's contribution to feature binding is sensory in nature, and thus involved in binding within and between sensory modalities. We trained rats to perform a crossmodal feature binding digging task (Experiment 1) using stimulus bowls characterized by particular odor-texture conjunctions. Using a within-subjects pharmacological design, the muscarinic cholinergic antagonist scopolamine was found to selectively impair acquisition (Experiment 3) of the binding task, while sparing its retrieval (Experiment 2). Our results suggest that sufficient cortical muscarinic cholinergic activity is necessary for the encoding of crossmodal sensory feature binding.
Notes: Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 44-02, page: 1051.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Toronto, 2005.

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