Investigating Striatal Attentional Circuits to Understand and Mitigate Deficits in Cognitive Flexibility Due to Sleep Loss
Abstract
Sleep loss compromises specific cognitive abilities that are both critical to real-world performance and dissociable from impairments in vigilant attention. Specifically, sleep loss impairs cognitive flexibility, which is the ability to adapt to changing events and environmental contingencies. We hypothesize that sleep loss-induced adenosinergic disruption of striatal dopaminergic circuits explains reduced attentional flexibility. We aim to identify dopaminergic and adenosinergic neural circuits responsible for sleep loss-induced deficits in cognitive flexibility using transgenic rats and optogenetic techniques, and performance measures that parallel task requirements for human cognitive flexibility. We seek to obtain converging evidence for the role of these circuits in humans by analyzing genotype differences in the effectiveness of wake-promoting agents during sleep deprivation.Year 2 of this ongoing project has focused on development of the transgenic rat models and on animal and human subject data collection.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jun 01, 2020
- Accession Number
- AD1118324
Entities
People
- Christopher J. Davis
- Hans Van Dongen
- Jonathan P Wisor
- Kimberly A Honn
Organizations
- Washington State University