How the Brain's Dopamine Circuitry Helps Regulate Cognitive Flexibility ...
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that regulates many critical processes such as movement, cognition, motivation, reward/pleasure, and hormone secretion. Dysfunction of the dopamine system has been implicated in many brain disorders, including schizophrenia, OCD, ADHD and Parkinson's disease. Dr. Urs will discuss his efforts to understand the organization and function of cortical dopamine ...
Aging is accompanied by profound changes in the brain's dopamine system that affect cognitive function. Evidence of powerful individual differences in cognitive aging has sharpened focus on identifying biological factors underlying relative preservation versus vulnerability to decline. Dopamine represents a key target in these efforts. Alterations of dopamine receptors and dopamine synthesis ...
Neural circuitry of behavioral flexibility
Decades of research have identified a role for dopamine neurotransmission in prefrontal cortical function and flexible cognition. Abnormal dopamine neurotransmission underlies many cases of cognitive dysfunction. New techniques using optogenetics have allowed for ever more precise functional segregation of areas within the prefrontal cortex, which underlie separate cognitive functions ...
Summary: For the first time, researchers have directly observed dopamine release in the human brain during moments of cognitive flexibility . Using PET imaging, they found that dopamine levels spike in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex when people switch between tasks — and the more dopamine ...
Dopaminergic control of cognitive flexibility in humans and animals
Abstract Striatal dopamine (DA) is thought to code for learned associations between cues and reinforcers and to mediate approach behavior toward a reward. Less is known about the contribution of DA to cognitive flexibility—the ability to adapt behavior in response to changes in the environment.
Striatal dopamine (DA) is thought to code for learned associations between cues and reinforcers and to mediate approach behavior toward a reward. Less is known about the contribution of DA to cognitive flexibility—the ability to adapt behavior ...
Learning and cognitive flexibility
Dopamine (DA) neurotransmission in the medial striatum and PFC is critical for basic reinforcement learning and the integration of negative feedback during reversal learning, whilst orbitofrontal 5-hydroxytryptamine (5-HT) likely mediates this type of low level flexibility , perhaps by reducing interference from salient stimuli.
Collectively, these studies show novel roles of cortical catecholamines in the regulation of tonic and phasic striatal dopamine dynamics and cognitive flexibility , updating our current views on ...
Dopaminergic Mechanisms of Cognitive Flexibility
Cognitive flexibility is the ability to appropriately adapt one's thinking and behavior to changing environmental demands and is conceptualized as an aspect of executive function. The dopamine system has been implicated in cognitive flexibility ; however, a direct, that is, neurochemical, link to cognitive flexibility has not been shown yet. The aim of this study was, therefore, to ...
These results have also prompted the suggestion of an inverted U-shaped relationship between dopamine concentration and cognitive performance. Recently, our group tested the effects of combining an increase in dopaminergic tone with tDCS on indices of cognitive flexibility [22].