Stimulus degradation impairs performance in a rodent continuous performance test

Sustained attention is a core cognitive domain that is often disrupted in neuropsychiatric disorders. Continuous performance tests (CPTs) are the most common clinical assay of sustained attention. In CPTs, participants produce a behavioral response to target stimuli and refrain from responding to non-target stimuli. Performance in CPTs is measured as the ability to discriminate between targets and non-targets. Rodent versions of CPTs (rCPT) have been developed and validated with both anatomical and pharmacological studies, providing a translational platform for understanding the neurobiology of sustained attention. In human studies, using degraded stimuli (decreased contrast) in CPTs impairs performance and patients with schizophrenia experience a larger decrease in performance compared to healthy controls. In this study, we tested multiple levels of stimulus degradation in a touchscreen version of the CPT in mice. We found that stimulus degradation significantly decreased performance in both males and females. The changes in performance consisted of a decrease in stimulus discrimination, measured as d, and increases in hit reaction time and reaction time variability. These findings are in line with the effects of stimulus degradation in human studies. Overall, female mice demonstrated a more liberal response strategy than males, but response strategy was not affected by stimulus degradation. These data extend the utility of the mouse CPT by demonstrating that stimulus degradation produces equivalent behavioral responses in mice and humans. Therefore, the degraded stimuli rCPT has high translational value as a preclinical assay of sustained attention.