Commentary: Donepezil enhances understanding of degraded speech in Alzheimer's disease

The interpretation offered (K) is that the prefrontal cortex of the cortical cholinergic attentional system improves the otherwise impaired control of the auditory cortex via the cholinergic basal forebrain. An extant cognitive hearing science account of the influence of selective auditory attention on speech perception under adverse conditions adopts a cholinergic top-down control assumption (Marsh and Campbell, 2016) with which Hardy et al.'s drug effect harmonizes: Physostigmine not only reduces the effort required to perform a working memory task but also the regional cerebral bloodflow in the right prefrontal cortex (Furey et al., 1997). [...]prefrontal control of loops of the brain's interacting ascending and descending auditory systems realize this filter.