ArticleNeuroImage2017
Modulation of ventral striatal activity by cognitive effort.
Article in NeuroImage, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Moving towards specificity: A systematic review of cue features associated with reward and punishment in anorexia nervosa.Clinical psychology review · 2020Pooled it
- Article
- Shared and distinct features of common effort-based decision-making paradigms and their relation to brain structure and neuropsychiatric conditions: An integrated narrative review.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Review
- Crossroads in the Learning Brain: The Neural Overlap Between Arithmetic and Phonological Processing.Human brain mapping · 2026Article
- Contribution of amygdala to dynamic model arbitration under uncertainty.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Reward Reinforcement Creates Enduring Facilitation of Goal-directed Behavior.Journal of cognitive neuroscience · 2024Article
- Altered neural anticipation of reward and loss but not receipt in adolescents with obsessive-compulsive disorder.BMC psychiatry · 2024Article
- Dissociable neural after-effects of cognitive and physical effort expenditure during reward evaluation.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2023Article
- Motivated for near impossibility: How task type and reward modulate task enjoyment and the striatal activation for extremely difficult task.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2023Article
- Learned industriousness as a translational mechanism in anorexia nervosa.Nature reviews psychology · 2023Article
- Reward enhances connectivity between the ventral striatum and the default mode network.NeuroImage · 2022Article
- Rewarding cognitive effort increases the intrinsic value of mental labor.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Signal Detection Theory as a Novel Tool to Understand Cognitive Fatigue in Individuals With Multiple Sclerosis.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2022Article
- Relationship of ventral striatum activation during effort discounting to clinical amotivation severity in schizophrenia.NPJ schizophrenia · 2021Article
- Ventral Striatal Activation During Reward Anticipation of Different Reward Probabilities in Adolescents and Adults.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2021Article
- Dissociable Motivational Deficits in Pre-manifest Huntington's Disease.Cell reports. Medicine · 2020Article
- Intact Reinforcement Learning But Impaired Attentional Control During Multidimensional Probabilistic Learning in Older Adults.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2020Article
- Cognitive and behavioral training interventions to promote self-control.Journal of experimental psychology. Animal learning and cognition · 2019Review
- The Subjective Value of Cognitive Effort is Encoded by a Domain-General Valuation Network.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2019Article
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
Abstract
Effort discounting theory suggests that the value of a reward should be lower if it was effortful to obtain, whereas contrast theory suggests that the contrast between the costly effort and the reward makes the reward seem more valuable. To test these alternative hypotheses, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) as participants engaged in feedback-based learning that required low or high cognitive effort to obtain positive feedback, while the objective amount of information provided by feedback remained constant. In the low effort condition, a single image was presented with four response options. In the high effort condition, two images were presented, each with two response options, and correct feedback was presented only when participants responded correctly to both of the images. Accuracy was significantly lower for the high effort condition, and all participants reported that the high effort condition was more difficult. A region of the ventral striatum selected for sensitivity to feedback value also showed increased activation to feedback presentation associated with the high effort condition relative to the low effort condition, when controlling for activation from corresponding control conditions where feedback was random. These results suggest that increased cognitive effort produces corresponding increases in positive feedback-related ventral striatum activity, in line with the predictions made by contrast theory. The accomplishment of obtaining a hard-earned intrinsic reward, such as positive feedback, may be particularly likely to promote reward-related brain activity.
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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.