Journal
PSYCHOPHARMACOLOGY
Volume 237, Issue 9, Pages 2855-2872Publisher
SPRINGER
DOI: 10.1007/s00213-020-05579-9
Keywords
Dopamine; Cabergoline; Basal ganglia; Striatum; Consciousness; Backward masking; Attentional blink; Spontaneous eye blink rate; EEG; Event-related potential
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Funding
- ERC by the H2020 European Research Council [ERC-2015-STG-679399]
- Amsterdam Brain and Cognition (ABC) grant
- Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) Azrieli Programme on Brain, Mind, and Consciousness
- Dr. Mortimer and Theresa Sackler Foundation
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Rationale Conscious perception is thought to depend on global amplification of sensory input. In recent years, striatal dopamine has been proposed to be involved in gating information and conscious access, due to its modulatory influence on thalamocortical connectivity. Objectives Since much of the evidence that implicates striatal dopamine is correlational, we conducted a double-blind crossover pharmacological study in which we administered cabergoline-a dopamine D2 agonist-and placebo to 30 healthy participants. Under both conditions, we subjected participants to several well-established experimental conscious-perception paradigms, such as backward masking and the attentional blink task. Results We found no evidence in support of an effect of cabergoline on conscious perception: key behavioral and event-related potential (ERP) findings associated with each of these tasks were unaffected by cabergoline. Conclusions Our results cast doubt on a causal role for dopamine in visual perception. It remains an open possibility that dopamine has causal effects in other tasks, perhaps where perceptual uncertainty is more prominent.
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