ArticleCurrent biology : CB2015
Reward Pays the Cost of Noise Reduction in Motor and Cognitive Control.
Article in Current biology : CB, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 182 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
182 citing papers in PubMed.
- Computationally Informed Insights Into Anhedonia and Treatment by Kappa Opioid Receptor Antagonism.Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging · 2025Trial
- The effects of pramipexole on motivational vigour during a saccade task: a placebo-controlled study in healthy adults.Psychopharmacology · 2024Trial
- Trial
- Catecholaminergic modulation of the cost of cognitive control in healthy older adults.PloS one · 2020Trial
- Kinematic encoding of the speed-accuracy trade-off in approach/avoidance decisions when facing social threats.Psychological research · 2026Article
- Common and Distinct Neural Substrates for Approach- and Avoidance-Motivated Actions.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- Temporal Dynamics of EEG Reflect Continuous Error Correction during Force Control.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- The Tower Foraging Park: A paradigm for studying cognitive and motor processes underlying behavioral flexibility in freely moving mice.iScience · 2026Article
- Control adjustment costs limit goal flexibility: Empirical evidence and a computational account.Psychological review · 2026Article
- Motivation biases behavior but not perception.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- Understanding mechanisms of voluntary engagement of mental effort using active inference.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- The cognitive and motor determinants of the perception of effort.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Linking reaction time variability to physiological markers of arousal across timescales.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Integrated approaches for investigating the neural bases of movement-highlights from the 34th Annual Meeting of the Society for the Neural Control of Movement.Journal of neurophysiology · 2026Article
- Dopamine Boosts Motivation for Prosocial Effort in Parkinson's Disease.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- Reward processing differences in autism: current understandings and future directions.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Review
- Audiovisual decision making and sensory evidence weighting is not affected by impulsivity or impulsivity related behaviours in young adults.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- How visual and proprioceptive feedback mediate the effect of monetary incentive on motor precision.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2025Article
- Neurocomputational mechanisms underlying the distinct motivational influences of reward and punishment on cognitive control.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Striatal Dopamine Actions and Movement: Inferences from Parkinson Disease.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Review
122 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
8 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Speed-accuracy trade-off is an intensively studied law governing almost all behavioral tasks across species. Here we show that motivation by reward breaks this law, by simultaneously invigorating movement and improving response precision. We devised a model to explain this paradoxical effect of reward by considering a new factor: the cost of control. Exerting control to improve response precision might itself come at a cost--a cost to attenuate a proportion of intrinsic neural noise. Applying a noise-reduction cost to optimal motor control predicted that reward can increase both velocity and accuracy. Similarly, application to decision-making predicted that reward reduces reaction times and errors in cognitive control. We used a novel saccadic distraction task to quantify the speed and accuracy of both movements and decisions under varying reward. Both faster speeds and smaller errors were observed with higher incentives, with the results best fitted by a model including a precision cost. Recent theories consider dopamine to be a key neuromodulator in mediating motivational effects of reward. We therefore examined how Parkinson's disease (PD), a condition associated with dopamine depletion, alters the effects of reward. Individuals with PD showed reduced reward sensitivity in their speed and accuracy, consistent in our model with higher noise-control costs. Including a cost of control over noise explains how reward may allow apparent performance limits to be surpassed. On this view, the pattern of reduced reward sensitivity in PD patients can specifically be accounted for by a higher cost for controlling noise.
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.