Deficits in Attentional Control: Cholinergic Mechanisms and Circuitry-Based Treatment Approaches

The cognitive control of attention involves maintaining task rules in working memory (or “online”), monitoring reward and error rates, filtering distractors, and suppressing prepotent and competitive responses. Weak attentional control increases distractibility and causes attentional lapses, impulsivity and attentional fatigue. Levels of tonic cholinergic activity (changes over tens of seconds or minutes) modulate cortical circuitry as a function of the demands on cognitive control. Increased cholinergic modulation enhances the representation of cues, by augmenting cue-evoked activity in thalamic glutamatergic afferents, thereby increasing the rate of detection. Such cholinergic modulation is mediated primarily via α4β2* nicotinic acetylcholine receptors. Animal experiments and clinical trials in adult patients with ADHD indicate that attentional symptoms and disorders may benefit from drugs that stimulate this receptor. Tonic cholinergic modulation of cue-evoked glutamatergic transients in prefrontal regions is an essential component of the brain’s executive circuitry. This circuitry model guides the development of treatments of deficits in attentional control.