Interactions between astrocytes and the reward-attention circuit: A model for attention focusing in the presence of nicotine

Recent studies in neurophysiology suggest that astrocytes-a specific type of glial cells in the central nervous system-perform dynamical signaling, integrating neural inputs and regulating synaptic transmissions. This work presents a mathematical model for bidirectional signaling between astrocytes and neurons, investigating the functional role of such glial cells in a neural network that simulates the influence of nicotine on attentional focus. Considering the neurons' firing frequency as an indicator of analysis, our results indicate that the tripartite synaptic transmission substantially changes the network activity, in comparison to the bipartite synapse. In addition, we show that this effect occurs specifically due to inclusion of astrocytes, corroborating experimental findings that show astrocytes improve of transmission performance in neural networks. Moreover, our simulations contribute to a better understanding of the astrocytary role in brain function and of synaptic transmission in a neuroglia network.