ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2016
Neural mechanisms underlying the impact of daylong cognitive work on economic decisions.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 52 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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
52 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Mental fatigue and brain activation using prolonged task-based fMRI: a systematic review on time-on-task and sequential task paradigms.Experimental brain research · 2026Pooled it
- Using functional connectivity changes associated with cognitive fatigue to delineate a fatigue network.Scientific reports · 2020Trial
- Testing the ego-depletion effect in optimized conditions.PloS one · 2019Trial
- Trial
- Fatigue Symptoms Influence Effort-Based Decision-Making in Major Depressive Disorder.Biological psychiatry global open science · 2026Article
- Day-to-day fluctuations in cognitive precision predict the domain-general intention-behavior gap.Science advances · 2026Article
- Article
- Fatigue Symptoms Influence Effort-Based Decision-Making in Major Depressive Disorder.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2025Article
- The Neurobiology of Cognitive Fatigue and Its Influence on Effort-Based Choice.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Shielding working memory from distraction is more effortful than flexible updating.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- A neurometabolic mechanism involving dmPFC/dACC lactate in physical effort-based decision-making.Molecular psychiatry · 2025Article
- No evidence for decision fatigue using large-scale field data from healthcare.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Lesions to Different Regions of the Frontal Cortex Have Dissociable Effects on Voluntary Persistence in Humans.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Mental fatigue impairs endurance performance in a time-to-exhaustion handgrip task: psychophysiological markers of effort engagement dynamics.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Prolonged exertion of self-control causes increased sleep-like frontal brain activity and changes in aggressivity and punishment.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Cognitive effort increases the intensity of rewards.PNAS nexus · 2024Article
- Trying Harder: How Cognitive Effort Sculpts Neural Representations during Working Memory.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Article
- Wagers for work: Decomposing the costs of cognitive effort.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- The online metacognitive control of decisions.Communications psychology · 2024Article
- Trying harder: how cognitive effort sculpts neural representations during working memory.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The ability to exert self-control is key to social insertion and professional success. An influential literature in psychology has developed the theory that self-control relies on a limited common resource, so that fatigue effects might carry over from one task to the next. However, the biological nature of the putative limited resource and the existence of carry-over effects have been matters of considerable controversy. Here, we targeted the activity of the lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) as a common substrate for cognitive control, and we prolonged the time scale of fatigue induction by an order of magnitude. Participants performed executive control tasks known to recruit the LPFC (working memory and task-switching) over more than 6 h (an approximate workday). Fatigue effects were probed regularly by measuring impulsivity in intertemporal choices, i.e., the propensity to favor immediate rewards, which has been found to increase under LPFC inhibition. Behavioral data showed that choice impulsivity increased in a group of participants who performed hard versions of executive tasks but not in control groups who performed easy versions or enjoyed some leisure time. Functional MRI data acquired at the start, middle, and end of the day confirmed that enhancement of choice impulsivity was related to a specific decrease in the activity of an LPFC region (in the left middle frontal gyrus) that was recruited by both executive and choice tasks. Our findings demonstrate a concept of focused neural fatigue that might be naturally induced in real-life situations and have important repercussions on economic decisions.
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.