台大心理系

Basal forebrain (BF) is an important structure implicated in attention, arousal and the control of cortical activity and plasticity. While most studies of the BF have focused on the cholinergic neurons, the anatomically more prominent population of non-cholinergic BF neurons has been largely neglected. Studies in my laboratory are guided by the hypothesis that cortically projecting GABAergic BF neurons encode the motivational salience of attended stimuli and translate this salience signal into fast and widespread amplification of cortical activity, resulting in enhanced behavioral performance. In this talk, I will describe new data from our ongoing studies linking non-cholinergic BF neurons to the generation of an event-related potential (ERP) response in the frontal cortex, and how these BF neurons regulate the speed of decision making as well as the speed of response inhibition. These results highlight the functional significance of the often-neglected non-cholinergic BF neurons.