COMT and DRD2/ANKK-1 gene-gene interaction account for resetting of gamma neural oscillations to auditory stimulus-driven attention

Attention capture by potentially relevant environmental stimuli is critical for human survival, yet it varies considerably among individuals. A large series of studies has suggested that attention capture may depend on the cognitive balance between maintenance and manipulation of mental representations and the flexible switch between goal-directed representations and potentially relevant stimuli outside the focus of attention; a balance that seems modulated by a prefrontostriatal dopamine pathway. Here, we examined inter-individual differences in the cognitive control of attention through studying the effects of two single nucleotide polymorphisms regulating dopamine at the prefrontal cortex and the striatum (i.e., COMTMet108/158Val and ANKK1/DRD2TaqIA) on stimulus-driven attention capture. Healthy adult participants (N = 40) were assigned to different groups according to the combination of the polymorphisms COMTMet108/158Val and ANKK1/DRD2TaqIA, and were instructed to perform on a well-established distraction protocol. Performance in individuals with a balance between prefrontal dopamine display and striatal receptor density was slowed down by the occurrence of unexpected distracting events, while those with a rather unbalanced dopamine activity were able maintain task performance with no time delay, yet at the expense of a slightly lower accuracy. This advantage, associated to their distinct genetic profiles, was paralleled by an electrophysiological mechanism of phase-resetting of gamma neural oscillation to the novel, distracting events. Taken together, the current results suggest that the epistatic interaction between COMTVal108/158Met and ANKK1/DRD2 TaqIa genetic polymorphisms lies at the basis of stimulus-driven attention capture.

Timing predictability enhances regularity encoding in the human subcortical auditory pathway

The encoding of temporal regularities is a critical property of the auditory system, as short-term neural representations of environmental statistics serve to auditory object formation and detection of potentially relevant novel stimuli. A putative neural mechanism underlying regularity encoding is repetition suppression, the reduction of neural activity to repeated stimulation. Although repetitive stimulation per se has shown to reduce auditory neural activity in animal cortical and subcortical levels and in the human cerebral cortex, other factors such as timing may influence the encoding of statistical regularities. This study was set out to investigate whether temporal predictability in the ongoing auditory input modulates repetition suppression in subcortical stages of the auditory processing hierarchy. Human auditory frequency–following responses (FFR) were recorded to a repeating consonant–vowel stimuli (/wa/) delivered in temporally predictable and unpredictable conditions. FFR amplitude was attenuated by repetition independently of temporal predictability, yet we observed an accentuated suppression when the incoming stimulation was temporally predictable. These findings support the view that regularity encoding spans across the auditory hierarchy and point to temporal predictability as a modulatory factor of regularity encoding in early stages of the auditory pathway.