ArticlePLoS biology2018
Catecholamines alter the intrinsic variability of cortical population activity and perception.
Article in PLoS biology, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 44 papers.
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44 citing papers in PubMed, 94 citations in OpenAlex.
- Altered Evening Aperiodic Activity and Microstate Dynamics in Insomnia Disorder: An OPM MEG Study.CNS neuroscience & therapeutics · 2026Article
- Phasic and tonic arousal distinctly shape human decision bias.Communications biology · 2026Article
- The default space theory: a unified oscillatory framework for spatial orientation and balance.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2026Article
- Catecholamines reduce choice history biases in perceptual decision making.PLoS biology · 2025Article
- Large-scale maps of altered cortical dynamics in early-stage psychosis are related to GABAergic and glutamatergic neurotransmission.Science advances · 2025Article
- Adaptive arousal regulation: Pharmacologically shifting the peak of the Yerkes-Dodson curve by catecholaminergic enhancement of arousal.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Modulating cortical excitability and cortical arousal by pupil self-regulation.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Modulatory Neurotransmitter Genotypes Shape Dynamic Functional Connectome Reconfigurations.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Linking the microarchitecture of neurotransmitter systems to large-scale MEG resting state networks.iScience · 2024Article
- Event boundaries drive norepinephrine release and distinctive neural representations of space in the rodent hippocampus.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Pharmacological Elevation of Catecholamine Levels Improves Perceptual Decisions, But Not Metacognitive Insight.eNeuro · 2024Article
- Linking Cognitive Integrity to Working Memory Dynamics in the Aging Human Brain.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Article
- Bistable perception, precision and neuromodulation.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2024Article
- Balancing excitation and inhibition: The role of neural network dynamics in working memory gating.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- Complexity and 1/f slope jointly reflect brain states.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Catecholaminergic neuromodulation and selective attention jointly shape perceptual decision-making.eLife · 2023Article
- Temporal dynamics of auditory bistable perception correlated with fluctuation of baseline pupil size.Psychophysiology · 2022Article
- Arousal state affects perceptual decision-making by modulating hierarchical sensory processing in a large-scale visual system model.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- Long-Range Amplitude Coupling Is Optimized for Brain Networks That Function at Criticality.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2022Article
- Functional Coupling of the Locus Coeruleus Is Linked to Successful Cognitive Control.Brain sciences · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The ascending modulatory systems of the brain stem are powerful regulators of global brain state. Disturbances of these systems are implicated in several major neuropsychiatric disorders. Yet, how these systems interact with specific neural computations in the cerebral cortex to shape perception, cognition, and behavior remains poorly understood. Here, we probed into the effect of two such systems, the catecholaminergic (dopaminergic and noradrenergic) and cholinergic systems, on an important aspect of cortical computation: its intrinsic variability. To this end, we combined placebo-controlled pharmacological intervention in humans, recordings of cortical population activity using magnetoencephalography (MEG), and psychophysical measurements of the perception of ambiguous visual input. A low-dose catecholaminergic, but not cholinergic, manipulation altered the rate of spontaneous perceptual fluctuations as well as the temporal structure of "scale-free" population activity of large swaths of the visual and parietal cortices. Computational analyses indicate that both effects were consistent with an increase in excitatory relative to inhibitory activity in the cortical areas underlying visual perceptual inference. We propose that catecholamines regulate the variability of perception and cognition through dynamically changing the cortical excitation-inhibition ratio. The combined readout of fluctuations in perception and cortical activity we established here may prove useful as an efficient and easily accessible marker of altered cortical computation in neuropsychiatric disorders.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.