Cholinergic Contributions to Supramodal Attentional Processes in Rats
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cholinergic neurotransmission has been shown to play an important role in modulating attentional processing of visual stimuli. However, it is not yet clear whether the neurochemical acetylcholine (ACh) is necessary exclusively for visual attention, or if it also contributes to attentional functions through some modality-independent (supramodal) mechanism. To answer this question, we examined the effects of reduced cortical cholinergic afferentation on both a traditional visual and a novel olfactory five-choice serial reaction time task (5-CSRTT), the benchmark rodent test of sustained attention in rats. Following the successful acquisition of both modalities of the task, the rats underwent either a cholinergic immunotoxic- or sham-lesion surgery of the nucleus basalis magnocellularis (NBM), the basal forebrain nuclei that provide the majority of neocortical ACh. Reduced cholinergic afferentation to the neocortex was induced by bilaterally infusing the cholinergic immunotoxin 192 IgG-saporin into the NBM. After surgery, ACh-NBM-lesioned rats performed comparably to sham-lesioned rats under the conditions of low attentional demand, but displayed behavioral decrements relative to the sham-lesioned rats when the attentional demands of the task were increased. Moreover, this decrement in attentional functioning correlated significantly with the number of choline acetyltransferase-immunoreactive cells in the NBM. Importantly, the nature of this behavioral decrement was identical in the visual and olfactory 5-CSRTTs. Together, these data suggest the presence of a supramodal attentional modulatory cortical network whose activity is dependent on cholinergic innervation from the NBM.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".