Inverted-U shaped dopamine actions on human working memory and cognitive control

By Roshan Cools, Mark D'Esposito. Biological Psychiatry, 2011

1,582 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Brain dopamine has long been implicated in cognitive control processes, including working memory. However, the precise role of dopamine in cognition is not well understood, partly because there is large variability in the response to dopaminergic drugs both across different behaviors and across different individuals. We review evidence from a series of studies with experimental animals, healthy humans and patients with Parkinson’s disease, which highlight two important factors that contribute to this large variability. First, the existence of an optimum dopamine level for cognitive function implicates the need to take into account baseline levels of dopamine when isolating dopamine’s effects. Second, cognitive control is a multi-factorial phenomenon, requiring a dynamic balance between cognitive stability and cognitive flexibility. These distinct components might implicate the prefrontal cortex and the striatum respectively. Manipulating dopamine will thus have paradoxical consequences for distinct cognitive control processes depending on distinct basal or optimal levels of dopamine in different brain regions.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3b72b37efd92660086548e57ad1b9050b20113b3

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

Citations in the corpus

Language control in bilinguals: The adaptive control hypothesis (2013, background): “Neuroimaging data also implicate distinct neural regions in task switching and interference control (e.g., Cools & D’Esposito, 2011).”
Between Persistence and Flexibility: The Yin and Yang of Action Control (2015, background): “As indicated by many pharmacological studies, neurotransmitters like dopamine do not have linear performance characteristics (i.e., more is not necessarily better), but follow an inverted U-shaped function, with best performance or efficiency related to medium levels (Cools & D’Esposito, 2011).”
Cognitive impairment in schizophrenia: aetiology, pathophysiology, and treatment (2023, background): “Cortical dopamine signalling plays a role in normal attention, working memory, and executive function, so impaired dopamine function in schizophrenia may therefore affect these processes [169 – 171].”
The role of prefrontal cortex in cognitive control and executive function (2021, background): “A particular issue is how CC operates in different states of the internal or external environment, for example, following stress, that may alter the neurochemical ambience and functioning of the PFC and produce curvilinear, “inverted U-shaped,” functions of performance efficacy [19].”
Beyond eye gaze: What else can eyetracking reveal about cognition and cognitive development? (2016, positive): “Just as for NE (Figure 5c, see pupillometry section), the relationship between cognitive control and DA is often described with an inverted U-shape function (Cools and D’Esposito, 2011), as shown in Figure 5d.”