Scopolamine slows the orienting of attention in primates to cued visual targets

The cholinergic agonist nicotine facilitates visuospatial attention shifting, but the role of muscarinic cholinergic drugs in this behavior is unclear. In order to establish the generality of cholinergic action in attention shifting, we administered the muscarinic antagonist scopolamine to two rhesus monkeys trained to perform a cued target detection (Posner) task. In this task, monkeys signaled the detection of a peripheral visual target by releasing a switch and their reaction times were measured. The location of the target's appearance was preceded by a cue that was either valid (target and cue in the same spatial location), invalid (target and cue to opposite hemifields), spatially uninformative (cues in both hemifields, target to one hemifield), or omitted altogether. Scopolamine produced a dose-dependent increase in all reaction times and a decrease in accuracy. The slowing was most prominent for valid cues in either visual field. However, slowing did not occur in trials whose cues lacked spatial information, or in tasks in which attention was directed to events at the fixation point, whether or not peripheral distractors were present. These results provide additional support for the hypothesis that acetylcholine plays a key role in reflexive attention shifting to peripheral visual targets.