ArticlePLoS biology2016
Pharmacological Fingerprints of Contextual Uncertainty.
Article in PLoS biology, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 74 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.
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.
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Who cites it
74 citing papers in PubMed.
- Methamphetamine-induced adaptation of learning rate dynamics depend on baseline performance.eLife · 2025Trial
- Neurophysiological contributors to advantageous risk-taking: an experimental psychopharmacological investigation.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2021Trial
- The Computational, Pharmacological, and Physiological Determinants of Sensory Learning under Uncertainty.Current biology : CB · 2021Trial
- Forget-me-some: General versus special purpose models in a hierarchical probabilistic task.PloS one · 2018Trial
- Changes in electrophysiological markers of cognitive control after administration of galantamine.NeuroImage. Clinical · 2018Trial
- A Reliable Effect of Alexithymia, but Not Autism, on Placebo Hypoalgesia.Autism : the international journal of research and practice · 2026Article
- Acetylcholine: a candidate substrate for hippocampal predictive learning?Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2026Review
- A Dual Prediction Error Populations Model of Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders: Bridging NMDA Hypofunction and Gain Hyperfunction.Schizophrenia bulletin · 2026Article
- Interpretable abstractions of artificial neural networks predict behavior and neural activity during human information gathering.Nature neuroscience · 2026Article
- Article
- Activity in human dorsal raphe nucleus signals changes in behavioural policy.Nature communications · 2026Article
- The phantastic organ: predictive processing in the brain.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Review
- Compensatory hallucinogenesis across three neuropsychiatric disorders: a Bayesian account.Brain communications · 2026Review
- The active construction of past episodes.Translational neuroscience · 2026Article
- Computational signatures of uncertainty are reflected in motor cortex excitatory neurochemistry.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Visual Hallucinations in Serotonergic Psychedelics and Lewy Body Diseases.Schizophrenia bulletin · 2025Review
- Dissecting how psychopathic traits are linked to learning in different contexts: A multilevel computational and electrophysiological approach.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2025Article
- Active information sampling in health and disease.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2025Review
- Hierarchical Neural Circuit Theory of Normalization and Inter-areal Communication.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Dorsal raphe nucleus controls motivation-state transitions in monkeys.Science advances · 2025Article
14 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
7 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Successful interaction with the environment requires flexible updating of our beliefs about the world. By estimating the likelihood of future events, it is possible to prepare appropriate actions in advance and execute fast, accurate motor responses. According to theoretical proposals, agents track the variability arising from changing environments by computing various forms of uncertainty. Several neuromodulators have been linked to uncertainty signalling, but comprehensive empirical characterisation of their relative contributions to perceptual belief updating, and to the selection of motor responses, is lacking. Here we assess the roles of noradrenaline, acetylcholine, and dopamine within a single, unified computational framework of uncertainty. Using pharmacological interventions in a sample of 128 healthy human volunteers and a hierarchical Bayesian learning model, we characterise the influences of noradrenergic, cholinergic, and dopaminergic receptor antagonism on individual computations of uncertainty during a probabilistic serial reaction time task. We propose that noradrenaline influences learning of uncertain events arising from unexpected changes in the environment. In contrast, acetylcholine balances attribution of uncertainty to chance fluctuations within an environmental context, defined by a stable set of probabilistic associations, or to gross environmental violations following a contextual switch. Dopamine supports the use of uncertainty representations to engender fast, adaptive responses.
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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.