POSTER DETAILS
Fluoxetine enhances perceptual learning and luminance perception during adulthood
MaΓ«va Gacoin, Suliann Ben Hamed
Date / Location: Wednesday, 13 July 2022 / S07-141
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Cortical plasticity is very active in early life at specific critical periods. This plasticity then progressively decreases into adulthood. While stabilizing cortical functions, reduced plasticity hampers recovery from developmental or congenital conditions such as amblyopia and cataract in adults. Recent studies suggest that a direct action on the cortical excitation/inhibition balance can help restore this plasticity by a direct or indirect action on GABAergic transmission. In this context, serotonin has been proposed to play a crucial role in the remodeling of cortical circuits. Here, we compare the behavioral scores of two adult rhesus macaques, in three behavioral tasks under systemic injections of Fluoxetine, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, or control saline injections. We first measured perception thresholds on a simple manual detection task. We found that, under chronic Fluoxetine injections, the 50% correct detection luminance perceptual thresholds consistently decreased for both monkeys, at the same time that false alarm to noise independently increased. In a second study, we used a manual target detection task in the presence of distractors to probe decision-making under uncertainty. Using signal detection theory, we show that Fluoxetine decreases the decision threshold as observed in the previous task, but not the D-prime. Last, macaques performed a dual choice saccadic task. Targets were associated with different reward values based on their spatial location. These contingencies changed across days. Fluoxetine significantly reduced spatial and reward biases. Overall, this indicates that Fluoxetine has both an impact on low-level visual processes and on top-down control processes.