Disruptive effects of muscimol infused into the basal forebrain on conditional discrimination and visual attention: differential interactions with cholinergic mechanisms

The behavioural effects of GABAergic manipulation of the basal forebrain were investigated using two behavioural tasks, which previous studies have shown to yield dissociable effects following quisqualate-induced lesions of the basal forebrain: a five-choice serial reaction time task, involving approaching the location of a brief visual stimulus that is associated with reward; and a conditional visual discrimination task, requiring retrieval of information about a discriminative stimulus that stays constant over time. Following acquisition of the tasks, chronic guide cannulae were stereotaxically implanted into the basal forebrain. Those animals trained on the conditional visual discrimination task showed a dose-dependent reduction in choice accuracy and a lengthening of latency to respond correctly to the visual stimulus following administration of the GABA-A agonist, muscimol (1, 2, 3 ng/µl/hem). While certain of these deficits, for example response latency, could be restored to control levels by co-administration of the GABA-A antagonist, bicuculline, none of the behavioural impairments could be significantly attenuated by systemic co-administration of the cholinesterase inhibitor, physostigmine (0.05, 0.1, 0.2 mg/kg, IP). Similarly, a dose dependent effect of muscimol (1, 1.5, 2 ng/µl/hem) on choice accuracy and correct response latency was observed on performance of the five-choice attentional task. However, in contrast to the conditional task, significant attenuation of the impairment in choice accuracy was obtained following administration of physostigmine (0.05 and 0.1 mg/kg). Attenuation of muscimol-induced deficits by administration of bicuculline was also observed. It is therefore evident that although manipulation of GABAergic activity in the region of the basal forebrain produces profound deficits in different tasks of cognitive function, only some of these may be due to modulation of the magnocellular cholinergic projection to the neocortex.