Dopamine Modulation in a Basal Ganglio-cortical Network Implements Saliency-based Gating of Working Memory

Dopamine exerts two classes of effect on the sustained neural activity in prefrontal cortex that underlies working memory. Direct release in the cortex increases the contrast of prefrontal neurons, enhancing the robustness of storage. Release of dopamine in the striatum is associated with salient stimuli and makes medium spiny neurons bistable; this modulation of the output of spiny neurons affects prefrontal cortex so as to indirectly gate access to working memory and additionally damp sensitivity to noise. Existing models have treated dopamine in one or other structure, or have addressed basal ganglia gating of working memory exclusive of dopamine effects. In this paper we combine these mechanisms and explore their joint effect. We model a memory-guided saccade task to illustrate how dopamine’s actions lead to working memory that is selective for salient input and has increased robustness to distraction.