Trial reportPsychopharmacology2015
Methylphenidate alters selective attention by amplifying salience.
Trial report in Psychopharmacology, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
What it found
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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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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
14 citing papers in PubMed, 33 citations in OpenAlex.
- Methylphenidate differentially alters corticostriatal connectivity after traumatic brain injury.Brain : a journal of neurology · 2025Trial
- Methylphenidate undermines or enhances divergent creativity depending on baseline dopamine synthesis capacity.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2023Trial
- Acetylcholine and noradrenaline enhance foraging optimality in humans.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Trial
- Catecholaminergic Modulation of Semantic Processing in Sentence Comprehension.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2020Trial
- Catecholaminergic modulation of trust decisions.Psychopharmacology · 2019Trial
- Article
- Ginkgo Biloba as a niche theme cognitive enhancer agent, 1420 dokumen of Scopus database. A bibliometric study from 1988 to 2024.F1000Research · 2025Article
- A Counting Stroop Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study on the Effects of ORADUR-Methylphenidate in Drug-Naive Children with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder.Journal of child and adolescent psychopharmacology · 2022Article
- Striatal dopamine dissociates methylphenidate effects on value-based versus surprise-based reversal learning.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Assessing attention orienting in mice: a novel touchscreen adaptation of the Posner-style cueing task.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2021Article
- Methylphenidate boosts choices of mental labor over leisure depending on striatal dopamine synthesis capacity.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2020Article
- Review
- Paying attention to attention in depression.Translational psychiatry · 2019Review
- Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy and the Adult ADHD Brain: A Neuropsychotherapeutic Perspective.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2016Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors at 4 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
rationaleMethylphenidate, the most common treatment of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), is increasingly used by healthy individuals as a "smart drug" to enhance cognitive abilities like attention. A key feature of (selective) attention is the ability to ignore irrelevant but salient information in the environment (distractors). Although crucial for cognitive performance, until now, it is not known how the use of methylphenidate affects resistance to attentional capture by distractors.
objectivesThe present study aims to clarify how methylphenidate affects distractor suppression in healthy individuals.
methodsThe effect of methylphenidate (20 mg) on distractor suppression was assessed in healthy subjects (N = 20), in a within-subject double-blind placebo-controlled crossover design. We used a visuospatial attention task with target faces flanked by strong (faces) or weak distractors (scrambled faces).
resultsMethylphenidate increased accuracy on trials that required gender identification of target face stimuli (methylphenidate 88.9 ± 1.4 [mean ± SEM], placebo 86.0 ± 1.2 %; p = .003), suggesting increased processing of the faces. At the same time, however, methylphenidate increased reaction time when the target face was flanked by a face distractor relative to a scrambled face distractor (methylphenidate 34.9 ± 3.73, placebo 26.7 ± 2.84 ms; p = .027), suggesting enhanced attentional capture by distractors with task-relevant features.
conclusionsWe conclude that methylphenidate amplifies salience of task-relevant information at the level of the stimulus category. This leads to enhanced processing of the target (faces) but also increased attentional capture by distractors drawn from the same category as the target.
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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.