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. The animal study with behavioral and brain-based data collection in transgenic rats has been completed, and a manuscript describing the results is nearly finished. After extended closure of the human sleep laboratory due to the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent delays in subject recruitment associated with the post-pandemic worker shortage affecting availability of the population we draw from, the double-blind human study continued in Year 5 and will require one additional year to be completed.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jun 01, 2023
- Accession Number
- AD1209661
Entities
People
- Christopher J. Davis
- Hans P. Van Dongen
- John M Hinson
- Jonathan P Wisor
- Kimberly A Honn
- Marcos Frank
- Paul Whitney
Organizations
- Washington State University