Conscious perception and the modulatory role of dopamine: no effect of the dopamine D2 agonist cabergoline on visual mas
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ORIGINAL INVESTIGATION
Conscious perception and the modulatory role of dopamine: no effect of the dopamine D2 agonist cabergoline on visual masking, the attentional blink, and probabilistic discrimination E.A Boonstra 1,2 & M.R van Schouwenburg 2 & A.K Seth 3,4 & M Bauer 5 & J.B Zantvoord 6 & E.M Kemper 7 & C.S Lansink 8 & H.A Slagter 1,2 Received: 14 February 2020 / Accepted: 3 June 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Rationale Conscious perception is thought to depend on global amplification of sensory input. In recent years, striatal dopamine has been proposed to be involved in gating information and conscious access, due to its modulatory influence on thalamocortical connectivity. Objectives Since much of the evidence that implicates striatal dopamine is correlational, we conducted a double-blind crossover pharmacological study in which we administered cabergoline—a dopamine D2 agonist—and placebo to 30 healthy participants. Under both conditions, we subjected participants to several well-established experimental conscious-perception paradigms, such as backward masking and the attentional blink task. Results We found no evidence in support of an effect of cabergoline on conscious perception: key behavioral and event-related potential (ERP) findings associated with each of these tasks were unaffected by cabergoline. Conclusions Our results cast doubt on a causal role for dopamine in visual perception. It remains an open possibility that dopamine has causal effects in other tasks, perhaps where perceptual uncertainty is more prominent. Keywords Dopamine . Cabergoline . Basal ganglia . Striatum . Consciousness . Backward masking . Attentional blink . Spontaneous eye blink rate . EEG . Event-related potential
* E.A Boonstra [email protected] 1
Department of Experimental and Applied Psychology, Institute for Brain and Behavior Amsterdam (iBBA) Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, Netherlands
2
Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam Brain and Cognition (ABC), Amsterdam, Netherlands
3
Department of Informatics Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science, University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9QJ, UK
4
Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, Azrieli Programme on Brain, Mind, and Consciousness, Toronto, Canada
5
School of Psychology, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK
6
Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, The Bascule, Academic Centre for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Amsterdam University Medical Centers, Amsterdam, Netherlands
7
Department of Pharmacy, Amsterdam University Medical Centers, Amsterdam, Netherlands
8
Swammerdam Institute for Life Sciences, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam Brain and Cognition (ABC), Amsterdam, Netherlands
Introduction The relationship between consciousness and the brain is often lauded as one of the big mysteries in contemporary science. How does the brain constrain its own spontaneous activity as well as the influences it undergoes from outside, in the determination of conscious awareness? Several influential theories propose that co
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