Trial reportNeuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology2015
Dopamine, locus of control, and the exploration-exploitation tradeoff.
Trial report in Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 30 papers.
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
30 citing papers in PubMed, 76 citations in OpenAlex.
- Disentangling the roles of dopamine and noradrenaline in the exploration-exploitation tradeoff during human decision-making.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2023Trial
- Augmenting Frontal Dopamine Tone Enhances Maintenance over Gating Processes in Working Memory.Journal of cognitive neuroscience · 2021Trial
- Working memory, cortical dopamine tone, and frontoparietal brain recruitment in post-traumatic stress disorder: a randomized controlled trial.Translational psychiatry · 2021Trial
- The catechol-O-methyltransferase inhibitor tolcapone modulates alcohol consumption and impulsive choice in alcohol use disorder.Psychopharmacology · 2020Trial
- Dopamine Modulates Dynamic Decision-Making during Foraging.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2020Trial
- Reward and avoidance learning in the context of aversive environments and possible implications for depressive symptoms.Psychopharmacology · 2019Trial
- Dopamine, time perception, and future time perspective.Psychopharmacology · 2018Trial
- Right inferior frontal cortex activity correlates with tolcapone responsivity in problem and pathological gamblers.NeuroImage. Clinical · 2017Trial
- Trial
- Dopamine depletion in Parkinson's increases directed but not random exploration.Science advances · 2026Article
- Competing value signals impair reward-learning via dopaminergic mechanisms and increase exploration.PLoS biology · 2026Article
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- Seeking motivation and reward: Roles of dopamine, hippocampus, and supramammillo-septal pathway.Progress in neurobiology · 2022Article
- A neural and behavioral trade-off between value and uncertainty underlies exploratory decisions in normative anxiety.Molecular psychiatry · 2022Article
- Neuromodulation of prefrontal cortex cognitive function in primates: the powerful roles of monoamines and acetylcholine.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2022Review
- The exploration-exploitation trade-off in a foraging task is affected by mood-related arousal and valence.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2021Article
- Attenuated Directed Exploration during Reinforcement Learning in Gambling Disorder.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2021Article
- Human complex exploration strategies are enriched by noradrenaline-modulated heuristics.eLife · 2021Article
- Dopaminergic modulation of the exploration/exploitation trade-off in human decision-making.eLife · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Whether to continue to exploit a source of reward, or to search for a new one of potentially greater value, is a fundamental and underconstrained decision. Recent computational studies of this exploration-exploitation tradeoff have found that variability in exploration across individuals is influenced by a functional polymorphism (Val158Met) in the catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) gene, whose protein product degrades synaptically released dopamine. However, these and other genotype-phenotype associations have rarely been causally tested. To directly test this association and to evaluate additional behavioral characteristics, including perceived locus of control (LOC), here we used the COMT inhibitor tolcapone in a randomized, double-blind, counterbalanced, within-subject study of 66 subjects genotyped for the Val158Met allele to assess the hypothesis that reducing COMT enzymatic activity interacts with genotype to increase uncertainty-driven exploration. In keeping with our initial hypothesis, tolcapone led to an increase in exploratory, but not exploitative, behavior in Met/Met rather than Val/Val subjects. Independent of genotype, those subjects with a more external LOC also showed increases in uncertainty-driven exploration on tolcapone relative to placebo. However, we did not replicate our previous finding that Met/Met subjects show greater exploration at baseline. Together these findings support a model in which exploration is hypothesized to have a dopaminergic basis. Moreover, in keeping with findings in other behavioral and cognitive domains, the response to an increase in presumptively frontal dopamine is dependent upon baseline dopamine tone.
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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.