Tait David S, Chase E Alexander, Brown Verity J
School of Psychology & Neuroscience, University of St Andrews, St Mary's Quad, South Street, St Andrews, Fife, Scotland, KY16 9JP.
Curr Pharm Des. 2014;20(31):5046-59. doi: 10.2174/1381612819666131216115802.
Attentional set-shifting tasks have been used as a measure of human fronto-executive function for over 60 years. The major contribution these tasks have made has been the quantification of cognitive deficits associated with human pathologies such as schizophrenia, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder and dementias related to Parkinson's, Huntington's and Alzheimer's diseases. Thirteen years ago an intradimensional/extradimensional attentional set-shifting task was developed for rats. Since then, there have been over 70 publications detailing the effects of various manipulations on task performance in rats, and 17 publications describing adaptations of the task for mice. Much of this literature has focused on animal models of neuropathology and cognitive deficits associated with schizophrenia and other human conditions. Altogether, these results have elucidated the roles of multiple neurotransmitters in the manifestation of cognitive deficits, and their subsequent amelioration, including dopamine, serotonin, acetylcholine and noradrenaline. However, the fundamental promise of the attentional set-shifting task, to measure cognitive flexibility in humans and rodents in a formally analogous way, has often been under investigated and over simplified. This review explores the research that led to the development of the rat attentional set-shifting task, and how subsequent use of the task has expanded our understanding of the psychological and neurological underpinnings of discrimination and reversal learning, as well as the formation, maintenance and shifting of attentional set.
注意力转换任务作为人类额叶执行功能的一种测量方法已使用了60多年。这些任务的主要贡献在于对与人类疾病相关的认知缺陷进行量化，这些疾病包括精神分裂症、注意力缺陷多动障碍以及与帕金森病、亨廷顿病和阿尔茨海默病相关的痴呆症。13年前，为大鼠开发了一种维度内/维度间注意力转换任务。从那时起，有70多篇出版物详细阐述了各种操作对大鼠任务表现的影响，还有17篇出版物描述了该任务在小鼠身上的适应性。这些文献大多集中在与精神分裂症和其他人类疾病相关的神经病理学和认知缺陷的动物模型上。总体而言，这些结果阐明了多种神经递质在认知缺陷表现及其后续改善中的作用，包括多巴胺、血清素、乙酰胆碱和去甲肾上腺素。然而，注意力转换任务以形式上类似的方式测量人类和啮齿动物认知灵活性的基本前景，常常未得到充分研究且被过度简化。这篇综述探讨了导致大鼠注意力转换任务发展的研究，以及该任务随后的应用如何扩展了我们对辨别和逆向学习的心理和神经学基础，以及注意力集的形成、维持和转换的理解。
