Ann-Kathrin Stock participated in this year’s “Psychologie und Gehirn” conference of the DGPA in Jena where she presented two posters. For one of her posters dealing with the differential effects of ADORA2A gene variations in pre-attentive visual sensory memory subprocesses she won the conference’s poster prize (“Posterpreis der Fachgruppe ‘Biologische Psychologie und Neuropsychologie’ der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Psychologie (DGPs) 2012”) endowed with a prize money of 300€.

The ADORA2A gene encodes the adenosine A2A receptor which is highly expressed in the striatum where it plays a role in modulating glutamatergic and dopaminergic transmission. While knowledge about the influence of phasic dopaminergic modulation on pre-attentive sensory stimulus processing is rather well-established, less is known about glutamatergic signaling in this context. Studying two polymorphisms, it could be shown that the rare homozygous genotypes seem to be associated with differences in the efficiency of pre-attentive sensory memory sub-processes most likely modulated by dopaminergic and glutamatergic signaling in a dissociable manner.

CONGRATULATIONS ANN-KATHRIN !!!