There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.
Abstract
Cholinergic neurons originating from the basal forebrain innervate the entire cortical
mantle. Choline-sensitive microelectrodes were used to measure the synaptic release
of cortical acetylcholine (ACh) at a subsecond resolution in rats performing a task
involving the detection of cues. Cues that were detected, defined behaviorally, evoked
transient increases in cholinergic activity (at the scale of seconds) in the medial
prefrontal cortex (mPFC), but not in a nonassociational control region (motor cortex).
In trials involving missed cues, cholinergic transients were not observed. Cholinergic
deafferentation of the mPFC, but not motor cortex, impaired cue detection. Furthermore,
decreases and increases in precue cholinergic activity predicted subsequent cue detection
or misses, respectively. Finally, cue-evoked cholinergic transients were superimposed
over slower (at the timescale of minutes) changes in cholinergic activity. Cortical
cholinergic neurotransmission is regulated on multiple timescales to mediate the detection
of behaviorally significant cues and to support cognitive performance.