Alterations in cortical D1 receptor density and reactivity of dopamine-binding sites, collectively termed as D1 receptor-sensitivity in the present study, have been experimentally shown to affect the working memory maintenance during delay-period. However, computational models addressing the effect of D1 receptor-sensitivity are lacking. A quantitative neural mass model of the prefronto-mesoprefrontal system has been proposed to take into account the effect of variation in cortical D1 receptor-sensitivity on working memory maintenance during delay. The model computes the delay-associated equilibrium states/operational points of the system for different values of D1 receptor-sensitivity through the nullcline and bifurcation analysis. Further, to access the robustness of the working memory maintenance during delay in the presence of alteration in D1 receptor-sensitivity, numerical simulations of the stochastic formulation of the model are performed to obtain the global potential landscape of the dynamics.
Model Type: Neural mass
Region(s) or Organism(s): Prefrontal cortex (PFC)
Receptors: D1
Transmitters: Dopamine
Model Concept(s): Bifurcation; Stochastic simulation; Working memory; Schizophrenia
Simulation Environment: MATLAB
Implementer(s): Reneaux, Melissa [reneauxm5 at gmail.com]; Gupta, Rahul [gupta.sbt at gmail.com]
References:
Reneaux M, Gupta R. (2018). Prefronto-cortical dopamine D1 receptor sensitivity can critically influence working memory maintenance during delayed response tasks PLOS ONE. 13(5)