The role of nicotinic and muscarinic acetylcholine receptors in attention.

RATIONALE: This study tried to determine the relative roles of muscarinic and nicotinic cholinergic receptors in attentional processing.
METHODS: The effects of cholinoceptor agonists and antagonists, and of an anticholinesterase, were studied on performance of rats in a five-choice serial reaction time task.
RESULTS: Scopolamine (0.1 mg/kg) and mecamylamine (5.0 mg/kg) produced deficits in accuracy and reaction time, respectively. This may suggest a differential role for the two types of cholinoceptors in information processing. Combinations of sub-threshold doses of scopolamine (0.01-0.03 mg/kg) and mecamylamine (0.5-1.6 mg/kg), which alone did not affect accuracy or reaction time, did not produce significant deficits in attention. However, the pattern of effects after combined treatment suggested that the differential deficits seen with these drugs alone remained. The anticholinesterase physostigmine (0.1 mg/kg) and the non-selective muscarinic agonist oxotremorine (0.03 mg/kg) induced severe behavioural disruption at doses that appeared to be relatively well tolerated in previous studies; this precluded the derivation of accuracy and response time data at these doses. At lower doses, neither physostigmine (0.05 mg/kg) nor oxotremorine (0.003 mg/kg) significantly affected any performance measure; this may reflect the ability of both drugs to indirectly or directly activate presynaptic muscarinic receptors that inhibit acetylcholine release, respectively.
CONCLUSIONS: Both muscarinic and nicotinic cholinoceptors may be important in attention but they may serve different roles in information processing; this hypothesis could be tested using tasks that place different emphasis on different stages of information processing.