RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Tracking Real Time Changes in Working Memory Updating and Gating with Event-Based Eye-Blink Rate
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 098103
DO 10.1101/098103
A1 Rachel Rac-Lubashevsky
A1 Heleen A. Slagter
A1 Yoav Kessler
YR 2017
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/01/04/098103.abstract
AB Effective working memory (WM) functioning depends on the gating process which regulates between maintenance and updating in WM. The present study used event-based eye-blink rate (ebEBR), which presumably reflects phasic striatal dopamine activity, to examine how the cognitive processes of gating and updating separately facilitate flexible updating of WM contents and the potential involvement of dopamine in these processes. Real-time changes in eye-blinks were tracked during performance on the reference-back task, in which demands on these two processes are independently manipulated. In all three experiments, trials which required WM updating, and trials, which required gate switching, were both associated with increased ebEBR. These results may support the prefrontal cortex basal ganglia WM model (PBWM) by linking updating and gating to striatal dopaminergic activity. In Experiment 3, ebEBR was used to determine what triggers gate switching. We found that switching to an updating mode (gate opening) is more stimulus driven and retroactive than switching to a maintenance mode, which is more context driven. Together, these findings show that ebEBR – a cheap, non-invasive, easy-to-use measure – can be used to track changes in WM demands during task performance, and hence, possibly of striatal dopamine activity.