ArticleThe Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience2015
Transcranial Stimulation over Frontopolar Cortex Elucidates the Choice Attributes and Neural Mechanisms Used to Resolve Exploration-Exploitation Trade-Offs.
Article in The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 41 papers.
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Who cites it
41 citing papers in PubMed.
- Online stimulation of the prefrontal cortex during practice increases motor variability and modulates later cognitive transfer: a randomized, double-blinded and sham-controlled tDCS study.Scientific reports · 2024Trial
- Competing value signals impair reward-learning via dopaminergic mechanisms and increase exploration.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- The association between anhedonia and prefrontal cortex activation in patients with major depression: a functional near-infrared spectroscopy study.European archives of psychiatry and clinical neuroscience · 2026Article
- Exploring the impact of message framing and physical activity levels on the effectiveness of health communication and its underlying cognitive processes.BMC psychology · 2026Article
- Alzheimer-related individual factors modulate effects of transcranial direct current stimulation strength on white matter integrity in mild cognitive impairment.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- No effect of preliminarily simulated cathodal HD-tDCS on the frontopolar cortex in the exploration-exploitation task.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Emerging Interventions in Behavioral Addictions: A Narrative Review of Psychedelics and Neuromodulation.Brain sciences · 2025Review
- Higher-order and distributed synergistic functional interactions encode information gain in goal-directed learning.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Meta-Analysis Reveals That Explore-Exploit Decisions are Dissociable by Activation in the Dorsal Lateral Prefrontal Cortex, Anterior Insula, and the Dorsal Anterior Cingulate Cortex.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Signatures of Perseveration and Heuristic-Based Directed Exploration in Two-Step Sequential Decision Task Behaviour.Computational psychiatry (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- The effectiveness of revocable precommitment strategies in reducing decision-making impulsivity.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2024Article
- Exploration-Exploitation Mechanisms in Recurrent Neural Networks and Human Learners in Restless Bandit Problems.Computational brain & behavior · 2024Article
- Converging Evidence for Frontopolar Cortex as a Target for Neuromodulation in Addiction Treatment.The American journal of psychiatry · 2024Review
- Motor System-Dependent Effects of Amygdala and Ventral Striatum Lesions on Explore-Exploit Behaviors.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Article
- Limitations associated with transcranial direct current stimulation for enhancement: considerations of performance tradeoffs in active-duty Soldiers.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2024Article
- Rethinking model-based and model-free influences on mental effort and striatal prediction errors.Nature human behaviour · 2023Article
- Modulation of ventromedial orbitofrontal cortical glutamatergic activity affects the explore-exploit balance and influences value-based decision-making.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2023Article
- Adaptive tuning of human learning and choice variability to unexpected uncertainty.Science advances · 2023Article
- What Does the Frontopolar Cortex Contribute to Goal-Directed Cognition and Action?The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2022Review
- Decision neuroscience and neuroeconomics: Recent progress and ongoing challenges.Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive science · 2022Review
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4 authors.
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Abstract
Optimal behavior requires striking a balance between exploiting tried-and-true options or exploring new possibilities. Neuroimaging studies have identified different brain regions in humans where neural activity is correlated with exploratory or exploitative behavior, but it is unclear whether this activity directly implements these choices or simply reflects a byproduct of the behavior. Moreover, it remains unknown whether arbitrating between exploration and exploitation can be influenced with exogenous methods, such as brain stimulation. In our study, we addressed these questions by selectively upregulating and downregulating neuronal excitability with anodal or cathodal transcranial direct current stimulation over right frontopolar cortex during a reward-learning task. This caused participants to make slower, more exploratory or faster, more exploitative decisions, respectively. Bayesian computational modeling revealed that stimulation affected how much participants took both expected and obtained rewards into account when choosing to exploit or explore: Cathodal stimulation resulted in an increased focus on the option expected to yield the highest payout, whereas anodal stimulation led to choices that were less influenced by anticipated payoff magnitudes and were more driven by recent negative reward prediction errors. These findings suggest that exploration is triggered by a neural mechanism that is sensitive to prior less-than-expected choice outcomes and thus pushes people to seek out alternative courses of action. Together, our findings establish a parsimonious neurobiological mechanism that causes exploration and exploitation, and they provide new insights into the choice features used by this mechanism to direct decision-making.
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