An integrative theory of locus coeruleus-norepinephrine function: adaptive gain and optimal performance.
@article{AstonJones2005AnIT, title={An integrative theory of locus coeruleus-norepinephrine function: adaptive gain and optimal performance.}, author={Gary Aston-Jones and Jonathan D. Cohen}, journal={Annual review of neuroscience}, year={2005}, volume={28}, pages={ 403-50 } }
Historically, the locus coeruleus-norepinephrine (LC-NE) system has been implicated in arousal, but recent findings suggest that this system plays a more complex and specific role in the control of behavior than investigators previously thought. We review neurophysiological and modeling studies in monkey that support a new theory of LC-NE function. LC neurons exhibit two modes of activity, phasic and tonic. Phasic LC activation is driven by the outcome of task-related decision processes and is…
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Adaptive gain and the role of the locus coeruleus–norepinephrine system in optimal performance
- Biology, PsychologyThe Journal of comparative neurology
- 2005
It is proposed that prefrontal areas of the locus coeruleus–norepinephrine system produce the above patterns of LC activity to optimize the utility of performance on both short and long time scales.
DREADD-mediated modulation of locus coeruleus inputs to mPFC improves strategy set-shifting
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Locus coeruleus neurons encode the subjective difficulty of triggering and executing actions
- Psychology, BiologyPLoS biology
- 2021
Data shows that LC neurons dynamically track the amount of effort produced to face both cognitive and physical challenges with a subsecond precision, providing key insight into effort processing and the contribution of the noradrenergic system, which is affected in several pathologies where effort is impaired, including Parkinson disease and depression.
Locus Coeruleus Norepinephrine in Learned Behavior: Anatomical Modularity and Spatiotemporal Integration in Targets
- Biology, PsychologyFrontiers in Neural Circuits
- 2021
New evidence suggests that the modular input-output organization of the LC could enable transient, task-specific modulation of distinct brain regions, and future work must further assess whether this spatial modularity coincides with functional differences in LC-NE subpopulations acting at specific times, and how such spatiotemporal specificity might influence learned behaviors.
Modafinil Shifts Human Locus Coeruleus to Low-Tonic, High-Phasic Activity During Functional MRI
- Biology, PsychologyScience
- 2008
The pharmacological agent modafinil was used to promote low-tonic/high-phasic LC-NE activity in healthy humans performing a cognitive control task during event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
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- Psychology, BiologyFrontiers in Psychology
- 2021
It is argued that knowledge about the role of the LC-NE system in establishing the flow experience may help to gain fundamental knowledge of flow and can contribute to unifying various empirical findings on this topic.
Functional specificity of the locus coeruleus-norepinephrine system in the attentional networks
- Psychology, BiologyFront. Behav. Neurosci.
- 2013
The reported results seem to suggest that Pa characterizes both alerting and orienting processes, since the temporally informative (alerting) double-cue evoked larger Pa amplitude compared to the no-cue condition, whereas the temporalally-and-spatially informative cue additionally accelerated Pa activation compared toThe alerting cue.
Role of the locus coeruleus arousal system in cognitive control
- Psychology, BiologyJournal of neuroendocrinology
- 2020
Empirical evidence is provided for a decisive role of the locus coeruleus noradrenergic arousal system in cognitive control in humans and novel insight into arousal‐related influences on cognitive control is provided.
Locus Coeruleus Engagement Drives Network Connectivity Dynamics In Humans And Rats
- Psychology, Biology2019 Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience
- 2019
Examining how LC engagement impacted BOLD and functional connectivity variability and dynamics in resting state and attentional networks in humans and rats provides preliminary cross-species evidence suggesting that LC’s computational role in regulating performance may rest largely on its role in regulation.
Context-Dependent Relationships between Locus Coeruleus Firing Patterns and Coordinated Neural Activity in the Anterior Cingulate Cortex
- Biology, PsychologybioRxiv
- 2020
The results suggest that modulations of information processing that reflect changes in coordinated activity patterns in cortical networks can result partly from ongoing, context-dependent, arousal-related changes in activation of the LC-NE system.
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