ArticleBehavioural brain research2014
Initial uncertainty in Pavlovian reward prediction persistently elevates incentive salience and extends sign-tracking to normally unattractive cues.
Article in Behavioural brain research, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 29 papers.
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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.
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Who cites it
29 citing papers in PubMed, 121 citations in OpenAlex.
- Intermittency and Predictability of a Cafeteria Diet Shape Food Intake, Adiposity, and Neurobehavioral Outcomes in Rats.Nutrients · 2026Article
- When cues take the wheel: cue-control across alcohol use disorder, binge-eating disorder, gambling disorder, and internet gaming disorder.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Review
- Motivation, attention, and uncertainty: insights from animal and human research and implications for addiction.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Review
- Phasic dopamine encodes persistent attraction to reward cues.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- The Incentive-Sensitization Theory of Addiction 30 Years On.Annual review of psychology · 2025Review
- Using sign tracking to experimentally increase self-control in rats.Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior · 2024Article
- Decomposition of Reinforcement Learning Deficits in Disordered Gambling via Drift Diffusion Modeling and Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging.Computational psychiatry (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- Evidence Accumulation and Neural Correlates of Uncertainty in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging · 2023Article
- Quantifying the instrumental and noninstrumental underpinnings of Pavlovian responding with the Price equation.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2022Review
- An operant ethanol self-administration paradigm that discriminates between appetitive and consummatory behaviors reveals distinct behavioral phenotypes in commonly used rat strains.Neuropharmacology · 2021Article
- Individual variation in the vigor and form of Pavlovian conditioned responses: Analysis of a model system.Learning and motivation · 2020Article
- Unpredictability as a modulator of drug self-administration: Relevance for substance-use disorders.Behavioural processes · 2020Review
- A direct and conceptual replication of post-loss speeding when gambling.Royal Society open science · 2020Article
- Maladaptive consequences of repeated intermittent exposure to uncertainty.Progress in neuro-psychopharmacology & biological psychiatry · 2020Review
- Occasion setters attain incentive motivational value: implications for contextual influences on reward-seeking.Learning & memory (Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.) · 2019Article
- Cued for risk: Evidence for an incentive sensitization framework to explain the interplay between stress and anxiety, substance abuse, and reward uncertainty in disordered gambling behavior.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2019Review
- Multiple reward-cue contingencies favor expectancy over uncertainty in shaping the reward-cue attentional salience.Psychological research · 2019Article
- Sign-tracking is an expectancy-mediated behavior that relies on prediction error mechanisms.Learning & memory (Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.) · 2018Article
- Electroencephalographic Evidence of Abnormal Anticipatory Uncertainty Processing in Gambling Disorder Patients.Journal of gambling studies · 2018Article
- Reward Prediction Errors in Drug Addiction and Parkinson's Disease: from Neurophysiology to Neuroimaging.Current neurology and neuroscience reports · 2017Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Uncertainty is a component of many gambling games and may play a role in incentive motivation and cue attraction. Uncertainty can increase the attractiveness for predictors of reward in the Pavlovian procedure of autoshaping, visible as enhanced sign-tracking (or approach and nibbles) by rats of a metal lever whose sudden appearance acts as a conditioned stimulus (CS+) to predict sucrose pellets as an unconditioned stimulus (UCS). Here we examined how reward uncertainty might enhance incentive salience as sign-tracking both in intensity and by broadening the range of attractive CS+s. We also examined whether initially induced uncertainty enhancements of CS+ attraction can endure beyond uncertainty itself, and persist even when Pavlovian prediction becomes 100% certain. Our results show that uncertainty can broaden incentive salience attribution to make CS cues attractive that would otherwise not be (either because they are too distal from reward or too risky to normally attract sign-tracking). In addition, uncertainty enhancement of CS+ incentive salience, once induced by initial exposure, persisted even when Pavlovian CS-UCS correlations later rose toward 100% certainty in prediction. Persistence suggests an enduring incentive motivation enhancement potentially relevant to gambling, which in some ways resembles incentive-sensitization. Higher motivation to uncertain CS+s leads to more potent attraction to these cues when they predict the delivery of uncertain rewards. In humans, those cues might possibly include the sights and sounds associated with gambling, which contribute a major component of the play immersion experienced by problematic gamblers.
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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.