Trial reportThe Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience2014
The role of the striatum in effort-based decision-making in the absence of reward.
Trial report in The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 47 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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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
47 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- The neural basis of cost-benefit trade-offs in effort investment: a quantitative activation likelihood estimation meta-analysis.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Pooled it
- Functional localization and categorization of intentional decisions in humans: A meta-analysis of brain imaging studies.NeuroImage · 2021Pooled it
- Changing the motivation for mental work with temporal interference stimulation.Translational psychiatry · 2026Article
- A corticostriatal circuit mediates the switching of defensive responses to an approaching threat.Translational psychiatry · 2026Article
- Shared and distinct features of common effort-based decision-making paradigms and their relation to brain structure and neuropsychiatric conditions: An integrated narrative review.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Review
- Contribution of amygdala to dynamic model arbitration under uncertainty.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Circuit-Based Approaches to Understanding the Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC).The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Review
- Exaggerated frontoparietal control over cognitive effort-based decision-making in young women with anorexia nervosa.Molecular psychiatry · 2025Article
- Serotonin and Effort-Based Decision-Making: Dissociating Behavioral Effects of 8-OH-DPAT and PCPA.Physiological research · 2024Article
- Neurobiological foundations and clinical relevance of effort-based decision-making.Brain imaging and behavior · 2024Review
- The effect of Huntington's disease on cognitive and physical motivation.Brain : a journal of neurology · 2024Article
- Policy abstraction as a predictor of cognitive effort avoidance.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2023Article
- Learned industriousness as a translational mechanism in anorexia nervosa.Nature reviews psychology · 2023Article
- Reward, motivation and brain imaging in human healthy participants - A narrative review.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2023Review
- Neural systems underlying the learning of cognitive effort costs.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2021Article
- Interactions between methodological and interindividual variability: How Monetary Incentive Delay (MID) task contrast maps vary and impact associations with behavior.Brain and behavior · 2021Article
- Induced affective states do not modulate effort avoidance.Psychological research · 2021Article
- Ventral Striatal Activation During Reward Anticipation of Different Reward Probabilities in Adolescents and Adults.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2021Article
- Increased cognitive workload evokes greater neurovascular coupling responses in healthy young adults.PloS one · 2021Article
- Dissociable Motivational Deficits in Pre-manifest Huntington's Disease.Cell reports. Medicine · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Decision-making involves weighing costs against benefits, for instance, in terms of the effort it takes to obtain a reward of a given magnitude. This evaluation process has been linked to the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) and the striatum, with activation in these brain structures reflecting the discounting effect of effort on reward. Here, we investigate how cognitive effort influences neural choice processes in the absence of an extrinsic reward. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging in humans, we used an effort-based decision-making task in which participants were required to choose between two options for a subsequent flanker task that differed in the amount of cognitive effort. Cognitive effort was manipulated by varying the proportion of incongruent trials associated with each choice option. Choice-locked activation in the striatum was higher when participants chose voluntarily for the more effortful alternative but displayed the opposite trend on forced-choice trials. The dACC revealed a similar, yet only trend-level significant, activation pattern. Our results imply that activation levels in the striatum reflect a cost-benefit analysis, in which a balance is made between effort discounting and the intrinsic motivation to choose a cognitively challenging task. Moreover, our findings indicate that it matters whether this challenge is voluntarily chosen or externally imposed. As such, the present findings contrast with classical findings on effort discounting that found reductions in striatum activation for higher effort by finding enhancements of the same neural circuits when a cognitively challenging task is voluntarily selected and does not entail the danger of losing reward.
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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.