Interaction of sensory and cognitive processes during visual recognition: The role of the associative areas of the cerebral cortex

The first part of the present study used a model of Alzheimers disease in two groups of animals (three monkeys in each), given injections of neurotoxins (monkeys of group I) and physiological saline (monkeys of group II). Before injections, all monkeys were trained to discriminate stimuli containing different types of information (spatial frequency grids and geometrical figures of different colors and with different spatial relationships between objects) and to perform spatial selection. The dynamics of impairments in the characteristics of working memory were identified using delayed differentiation tasks in monkeys of both groups before injections and every two months after injections. Quantitative measures of impairments were made using the entropy of visual recognition, which characterizes uncertainty in decision-taking. The development of Alzheimers disease in rhesus macaques was characterized by a deficit of working memory, resulting from lesions to the two component processes of memory. Impairments of the first of these in monkeys of group I were manifest as a significant increase in entropy, which is associated with correct decision-taking. The magnitude of the increase depended on the type of visual information. Impairments of the second component were characterized by increases in entropy associated with refusals to take decisions and were independent of the delay duration and the type of visual information. Monkeys given injections of physiological saline showed no significant changes in these characteristics. The features of working memory were also studied in the second part of the investigation, using four groups of Rhesus macaques: intact, those with bilateral extirpation of the sulcus principalis or field 7 or both: degradation again identified two components. Entropy associated with this was increased significantly for most of the stimuli tested on monkeys of all extirpation groups as compared with intact animals. Significant differences were found in these characteristics for a number of stimuli, which depended on the location of the structures removed. The characteristics of impairments of the components of working memory resulting in the development of Alzheimers disease showed that the cholinergic mechanisms responsible for sensory processing differ from those involved in decision-taking. The structural-functional organization of the interaction of sensory and cognitive processes controlled by the motivation and attention systems is discussed, as is the role of the associative areas of the cortex.Translated from Rossiiskii Fiziologicheskii Zhurnal imeni I. M. Sechenova, Vol. 89, No. 10, pp. 1226–1239, October, 2003.