Bidirectional interactions between circadian entrainment and cognitive performance
Open Access
- 1 March 2012
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Learning & Memory
- Vol. 19 (3), 126-141
- https://doi.org/10.1101/lm.023499.111
Abstract
Circadian rhythms influence a variety of physiological and behavioral processes; however, little is known about how circadian rhythms interact with the organisms' ability to acquire and retain information about their environment. These experiments tested whether rats trained outside their endogenous active period demonstrate the same rate of acquisition, daily performance, and remote memory ability as their nocturnally trained counterparts in tasks of sustained attention and spatial memory. Furthermore, we explored how daily task training influenced circadian patterns of activity. We found that rats demonstrate better acquisition and performance on an operant task requiring attentional effort when trained during the dark-phase. Time of day did not affect acquisition or performance on the Morris water maze; however, when animals were retested 2 wk after their last day of training, they showed better remote memory if training originally occurred during the dark-phase. Finally, attentional, but not spatial, task performance during the light-phase promotes a shift toward diurnality and the synchronization of activity to the time of daily training; this shift was most robust when the demands on the cognitive control of attention were highest. Our findings support a theory of bidirectional interactions between cognitive performance and circadian processes and are consistent with the view that the circadian abnormalities associated with shift-work, aging, and neuropsychiatric illnesses may contribute to the deleterious effects on cognition often present in these populations. Furthermore, these findings suggest that time of day should be an important consideration for a variety of cognitive tasks principally used in psychological and neuroscience research.Keywords
This publication has 64 references indexed in Scilit:
- Enhanced Control of Attention by Stimulating Mesolimbic-Corticopetal Cholinergic CircuitryJournal of Neuroscience, 2011
- Challenges to attention: A continuous arterial spin labeling (ASL) study of the effects of distraction on sustained attentionNeuroImage, 2011
- Interactions between cognition and circadian rhythms: Attentional demands modify circadian entrainment.Behavioral Neuroscience, 2009
- Endogenous anxiety and stress responses in water maze and Barnes maze spatial memory tasksBehavioural Brain Research, 2008
- New neurons in the adult brain: The role of sleep and consequences of sleep lossSleep Medicine Reviews, 2008
- Rats and humans paying attention: Cross-species task development for translational research.Neuropsychology, 2008
- Prefrontal Acetylcholine Release Controls Cue Detection on Multiple TimescalesNeuron, 2007
- Age and time-of-day effects on learning and memory in a non-matching-to-sample testNeurobiology of Aging, 2004
- Time of day modulation of conditioned place preference in rats depends on the strain of rat usedNeurobiology of Learning and Memory, 2004
- Phase response curves for social entrainmentJournal of Comparative Physiology A, 1988