The effects of scopolamine on working memory in healthy young volunteers

Twenty healthy young adults completed a series of nonverbal and problem solving tasks in a repeated measures design involving placebo and 0.6 mg scopolamine, administered by subcutaneous injection. Subjects completed the test battery under standard presentation conditions and with concurrent articulation, which precludes verbal recoding of test material. Under standard presentation conditions, scopolamine significantly impaired performance on the problem solving task and on tasks of visuo-spatial and spatial memory; memory for abstract shapes was not impaired. Concurrent articulation impaired performance on the shape recognition and interacted with drug treatment on the problem solving task. The results suggest that scopolamine impairs working memory, and that the decrement is at the level of the central executive mechanism rather than the subsystems which it controls.