Trial reportThe Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience2013
Free energy, precision and learning: the role of cholinergic neuromodulation.
Trial report in The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 159 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
159 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Disrupted Dorsal Mid-Insula Activation During Interoception Across Psychiatric Disorders.The American journal of psychiatry · 2021Pooled it
- Trial
- Atomoxetine restores the response inhibition network in Parkinson's disease.Brain : a journal of neurology · 2016Trial
- Cortical Coupling Reflects Bayesian Belief Updating in the Deployment of Spatial Attention.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2015Trial
- Acetylcholine enhances deviance detection in Hodgkin-Huxley neuronal networks.Cognitive neurodynamics · 2026Article
- Human hippocampal ripples tune cortical responses based on predicted uncertainty.Nature neuroscience · 2026Article
- Dopamine Compensates for Amyloid-Induced Default Mode Network Dysfunction to Support Learning.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- The primate claustrum as a hub for precision weighting of prediction errors across the cortical hierarchy.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Cortical neuron classes and recursive curvature collapse: a neurobiological model of conscious dynamics.Theory in biosciences = Theorie in den Biowissenschaften · 2026Article
- Alzheimer's disease and memantine effects on NMDA-receptor blockade: non-invasive in vivo insights from magnetoencephalography.Molecular psychiatry · 2026Article
- Article
- Compensatory hallucinogenesis across three neuropsychiatric disorders: a Bayesian account.Brain communications · 2026Review
- Predictive Processing Over the Course of Aging: Multiple Timescales of Effective Connectivity.The European journal of neuroscience · 2026Article
- The active construction of past episodes.Translational neuroscience · 2026Article
- Visual Hallucinations in Serotonergic Psychedelics and Lewy Body Diseases.Schizophrenia bulletin · 2025Review
- Alzheimer's disease and its progression reduce pyramidal cell gain and connectivity.Alzheimer's & dementia : the journal of the Alzheimer's Association · 2025Article
- Five Fristonian Formulae.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Respiration Facilitates Behavior During Multisensory Integration.Psychophysiology · 2025Article
- Article
- The Functional Anatomy of Nociception: Effective Connectivity in Chronic Pain and Placebo Response.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
99 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Acetylcholine (ACh) is a neuromodulatory transmitter implicated in perception and learning under uncertainty. This study combined computational simulations and pharmaco-electroencephalography in humans, to test a formulation of perceptual inference based upon the free energy principle. This formulation suggests that ACh enhances the precision of bottom-up synaptic transmission in cortical hierarchies by optimizing the gain of supragranular pyramidal cells. Simulations of a mismatch negativity paradigm predicted a rapid trial-by-trial suppression of evoked sensory prediction error (PE) responses that is attenuated by cholinergic neuromodulation. We confirmed this prediction empirically with a placebo-controlled study of cholinesterase inhibition. Furthermore, using dynamic causal modeling, we found that drug-induced differences in PE responses could be explained by gain modulation in supragranular pyramidal cells in primary sensory cortex. This suggests that ACh adaptively enhances sensory precision by boosting bottom-up signaling when stimuli are predictable, enabling the brain to respond optimally under different levels of environmental uncertainty.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.