Editorial: Neuromodulation of executive circuits

The executive control of behavior involves functional interactions between the frontal cortex and other cortical and subcortical brain regions, in particular with the striatum and thalamus, via parallel fronto-striatal-thalamic loops. In all of these brain regions, neuronal excitability, and synaptic transmission are regulated by serotonergic, dopaminergic, cholinergic, adrenergic, and peptidergic neuromodulatory afferent systems that are critical for optimizing cognitive task performance. By contrast, dysfunctional neuromodulation of fronto-striatal circuits is implicated in various neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders, such as schizophrenia, depression, and Parkinson's disease. Yet, despite decades of intense investigation, it remains poorly understood how neuromodulators influence the flow of neural activity in fronto-striatal circuits to facilitate cognition. Crucial pending questions in the field include (but are not limited to): (1) How the heterogeneity of neuron subtypes and their connectivity contribute to the complexity of the underlying cellular microcircuits that are substrates of neuromodulator effects. (2) Whether the numerous receptor subtypes mediating the neuromodulator effects have cell-type specific expression patterns and effects, (3) How multiple intracellular signaling cascades mediating neuromodulator receptor effects interact in individual neurons, (4) How do neuromodulators control the strength and plasticity of synaptic inputs onto different neuron types in fronto-striatal circuits, and (5) To what extent cellular, circuit and system level effects of neuromodulators are conserved across species. This Research Topic includes 10 original research articles and seven review articles addressing the role of neuromodulation in executive function at multiple levels of analysis, ranging from the activity of single voltage-dependent ion channels to computational models of network interactions in cortex-striatum-thalamus systems.

[1]  Daniel Durstewitz,et al.  Dopamine modulation , 2008, Scholarpedia.

[2]  Kenji Morita,et al.  Striatal dopamine ramping may indicate flexible reinforcement learning with forgetting in the cortico-basal ganglia circuits , 2014, Frontiers in neural circuits.

[3]  Daniel Avesar,et al.  Activity-dependent serotonergic excitation of callosal projection neurons in the mouse prefrontal cortex , 2014, Front. Neural Circuits..

[4]  M. Jaber,et al.  Dopamine control of pyramidal neuron activity in the primary motor cortex via D2 receptors , 2014, Front. Neural Circuits.

[5]  T. Morera-Herreras,et al.  Interaction between the 5-HT system and the basal ganglia: functional implication and therapeutic perspective in Parkinson's disease , 2014, Front. Neural Circuits.

[6]  H. Mansvelder,et al.  Cholinergic modulation of the medial prefrontal cortex: the role of nicotinic receptors in attention and regulation of neuronal activity , 2014, Front. Neural Circuits.

[7]  Hongyu Ruan,et al.  Dopamine-enabled anti-Hebbian timing-dependent plasticity in prefrontal circuitry , 2014, Front. Neural Circuits.

[8]  A. Graybiel,et al.  Severe drug-induced repetitive behaviors and striatal overexpression of VAChT in ChAT-ChR2-EYFP BAC transgenic mice , 2014, Front. Neural Circuits.

[9]  B. Waterhouse,et al.  New perspectives on catecholaminergic regulation of executive circuits: evidence for independent modulation of prefrontal functions by midbrain dopaminergic and noradrenergic neurons , 2014, Front. Neural Circuits.

[10]  R. Schmidt,et al.  Dopamine modulation of learning and memory in the prefrontal cortex: insights from studies in primates, rodents, and birds , 2014, Front. Neural Circuits..

[11]  F. Wörgötter,et al.  Neuromodulatory adaptive combination of correlation-based learning in cerebellum and reward-based learning in basal ganglia for goal-directed behavior control , 2014, Front. Neural Circuits.

[12]  Carmen Varela,et al.  Thalamic neuromodulation and its implications for executive networks , 2014, Front. Neural Circuits.

[13]  Kelsey L. Clark,et al.  The role of prefrontal catecholamines in attention and working memory , 2014, Front. Neural Circuits.

[14]  D. Johnston,et al.  Subcircuit-specific neuromodulation in the prefrontal cortex , 2014, Front. Neural Circuits.

[15]  M. Carli,et al.  Serotoninergic and dopaminergic modulation of cortico-striatal circuit in executive and attention deficits induced by NMDA receptor hypofunction in the 5-choice serial reaction time task , 2014, Front. Neural Circuits.

[16]  S. Hestrin,et al.  Nicotinic modulation of cortical circuits , 2014, Front. Neural Circuits.

[17]  T. Yamamori,et al.  mRNA expression profile of serotonin receptor subtypes and distribution of serotonergic terminations in marmoset brain , 2014, Front. Neural Circuits.

[18]  Cell-attached single-channel recordings in intact prefrontal cortex pyramidal neurons reveal compartmentalized D1/D5 receptor modulation of the persistent sodium current , 2015, Front. Neural Circuits.