Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We developed a cognitive-pharmacokinetic computational(CPC) model to understand how pharmacoactive substances,such as caffeine and toluene, modulate cognition. In this in-tegrated model, dynamic physiological mechanisms are sim-ulated to predict concentrations of the solvent toluene in thebrain, which modulates specific cognitive systems in a dose-response fashion over multiple hours. We used our CPC modelto reanalyze the results from prior research that documented anincrease in reaction time following exposure to toluene in sev-eral laboratory tasks with no change in accuracy. Our analysisprovides tentative evidence that toluene affects motor execu-tion, rather than attention or declarative memory.