Methylphenidate reduces orienting bias in healthy individuals

作者：Leehe Peled‐Avron, Hagar Gelbard Goren, Noa Brande-Eilat, Shirel Dorman-Ilan, Aviv Segev, Kfir Feffer, Hila Z. Gvirts, Yechiel Levkovitz, Yael Barnea, Yael Doreen Lewis, Rachel Tomer · 发表于：Journal of Psychopharmacology · 年份：2021 · DOI：10.1177/0269881121996884 · 被引用次数：12 · 研究领域：Spatial Neglect and Hemispheric Dysfunction、Neural and Behavioral Psychology Studies、Cognitive and developmental aspects of mathematical skills

BACKGROUND: Healthy individuals show subtle orienting bias, a phenomenon known as pseudoneglect, reflected in a tendency to direct greater attention toward one hemispace. Accumulating evidence indicates that this bias is an individual trait, and attention is preferentially directed contralaterally to the hemisphere with higher dopamine signaling. Administration of methylphenidate (MPH), a dopamine transporter inhibitor, was shown to normalize aberrant spatial attention bias in psychiatric and neurological patients, suggesting that the reduced orienting bias following administration of MPH reflects an asymmetric effect of the drug, increasing extracellular dopamine in the hemisphere with lower dopamine signaling. AIM: We predicted that, similarly to its effect on patients with brain pathology, MPH will reduce the orienting bias in healthy subjects. METHODS: To test this hypothesis, we examined the behavioral effects of a single dose (20 mg) of MPH on orienting bias in 36 healthy subjects (18 females) in a randomized, double-blind placebo-controlled, within-subject design, using the greyscales task, which has been shown to detect subtle attentional biases in both patients and healthy individuals. RESULTS/OUTCOMES: Results demonstrate that healthy individuals vary in both direction and magnitude of spatial orienting bias and show reduced magnitude of orienting bias following MPH administration, regardless of the initial direction of asymmetry. CONCLUSIONS/INTERPRETATIONS: Our fi...