Search research articles

ABOUT JoVE

Overview Leadership Blog JoVE Help Center

AUTHORS

Publishing Process Editorial Board Scope & Policies Peer Review FAQ Submit

LIBRARIANS

Testimonials Subscriptions Access Resources Library Advisory Board FAQ

RESEARCH

JoVE Journal Methods Collections JoVE Encyclopedia of Experiments Archive

EDUCATION

JoVE Core JoVE Business JoVE Science Education JoVE Lab Manual Faculty Resource Center Faculty Site

Terms & Conditions of Use

Related Concept Videos

Cholinergic Receptors: Muscarinic

Cholinergic Receptors: Muscarinic

The pharmacological actions of acetylcholine are elicited via its binding to two families of cholinergic receptors or cholinoceptors, namely, muscarinic and nicotinic receptors. Muscarinic receptors are G protein-coupled receptors and have five subtypes, M1–M5. All mAChR subtypes are activated by acetylcholine and blocked by the antagonist, atropine.
The subtypes M1, M3, and M5 couple with the Gq subunit and activate the phospholipase C (PLC) activity, mobilizing intracellular Ca2+. Activation...

You might also read

Related Articles

Articles linked to this work by shared authors, journal, and citation graph.

Sort by

Same author

Evaluating large language models for diagnostic reasoning from unstructured clinical narratives in epilepsy.

Communications medicine·2026

Same author

Neural and Behavioral Correlates of Pure Tone and Narrowband Noise Processing in Rats: A Tradeoff between Discrimination and Sensitivity.

eNeuro·2026

Same author

Ventral pallidum efferent pathways via mediodorsal thalamus and lateral habenula mediate default mode network regulation.

iScience·2025

Same author

Phase of firing does not reflect temporal order in sequence memory of humans and recurrent neural networks.

Nature neuroscience·2025

Same author

Conscious and unconscious processes in vision and homeostasis.

Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience·2025

Same author

GABAergic neurons in basal forebrain exert frequency-specific modulation on auditory cortex and enhance attentional selection of auditory stimuli.

Communications biology·2025

Same journal

Assessing circuit function in the developing <i>Xenopus</i> tadpole: a survey of the behavioral toolkit and underlying neural substrates.

Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience·2026

Same journal

Dawn of the dread: threatening cinematic virtual reality environments enhance general but not specific pavlovian-instrumental transfer.

Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience·2026

Same journal

Transcranial alternating current stimulation improves cognitive functions in healthy subjects through modifying frontoparietal and dorsal attention networks based on personalized individual theta frequency analysis.

Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience·2026

Same journal

Functional loss of PKMζ in the dorsal hippocampus potentiates the time-dependent increase in false contextual fear memory and impairs spatial recognition memory in mice.

Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience·2026

Same journal

Distinct orbitofrontal circuits with dorsal and ventral CA1 differentially regulate spatial memory and emotional behaviors.

Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience·2026

Same journal

Towards a neurophysiological model of kundalini: a theoretical framework informed by preliminary clinical observations.

Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience·2026

See all related articles

Search research articles

Related Experiment Video

Updated: May 27, 2026

Investigating Object Representations in the Macaque Dorsal Visual Stream Using Single-unit Recordings

Investigating Object Representations in the Macaque Dorsal Visual Stream Using Single-unit Recordings

Published on: August 1, 2018

Cholinergic control of visual categorization in macaques.

Nikolaos C Aggelopoulos¹, Stefanie Liebe, Nikos K Logothetis

¹Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics Tuebingen, Germany.

Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience

|November 24, 2011

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Acetylcholine (ACh) impacts learning new information, crucial for adapting behavior. Scopolamine, an ACh receptor blocker, impairs visual categorization of novel stimuli but not familiar ones.

Keywords:

acetylcholine categorization cognition cognitive learning macaque muscarinic scopolamine

More Related Videos

A Gaze-Contingent Display Framework for Perceptual Learning Research with Simulated Central Vision Loss

A Gaze-Contingent Display Framework for Perceptual Learning Research with Simulated Central Vision Loss

Published on: April 11, 2025

Defining the Role Of Language in Infants' Object Categorization with Eye-tracking Paradigms

Defining the Role Of Language in Infants' Object Categorization with Eye-tracking Paradigms

Published on: February 8, 2019

Related Experiment Videos

Last Updated: May 27, 2026

Investigating Object Representations in the Macaque Dorsal Visual Stream Using Single-unit Recordings

Investigating Object Representations in the Macaque Dorsal Visual Stream Using Single-unit Recordings

Published on: August 1, 2018

A Gaze-Contingent Display Framework for Perceptual Learning Research with Simulated Central Vision Loss

A Gaze-Contingent Display Framework for Perceptual Learning Research with Simulated Central Vision Loss

Published on: April 11, 2025

Defining the Role Of Language in Infants' Object Categorization with Eye-tracking Paradigms

Defining the Role Of Language in Infants' Object Categorization with Eye-tracking Paradigms

Published on: February 8, 2019

Area of Science:

Neuroscience
Cognitive Science
Psychology

Background:

Acetylcholine (ACh) is a neurotransmitter vital for cognitive functions, including information acquisition.
Impairments in ACh signaling are linked to cognitive deficits, such as those seen in Alzheimer's disease.
Categorization, a key cognitive process, involves acquiring and processing information, but its relationship with ACh was unstudied.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate the role of acetylcholine in visual categorization.
To examine the effects of scopolamine, a muscarinic ACh receptor antagonist, on the categorization of familiar and novel visual stimuli in macaque monkeys.

Main Methods:

Systemic injections of scopolamine were administered to macaque monkeys.
Peripheral effects of scopolamine were controlled for.
Monkeys performed visual categorization tasks using both familiar and novel stimuli under varying conditions of visual noise.

Main Results:

Scopolamine administration disrupted visual categorization performance specifically for novel stimuli.
Performance was not impaired when categorizing familiar stimuli, indicating no significant central effect on other cognitive functions.
Categorization accuracy decreased with increased visual noise, but scopolamine did not exacerbate performance deficits at lower stimulus coherence levels.

Conclusions:

Acetylcholine plays a specific role in the cognitive process of assigning novel stimuli to established categories.
Scopolamine's central action impairs the processing of new information required for categorization.
The findings suggest ACh is critical for learning and adapting to new situations via categorization.