Trial reporteLife2017
Noradrenaline blockade specifically enhances metacognitive performance.
Trial report in eLife, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 34 papers.
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
34 citing papers in PubMed.
- Potential Delayed Positive Effects of tDCS on Improving Introspective Accuracy in Social Cognition in Schizophrenia.Schizophrenia bulletin · 2025Trial
- Noradrenergic deficits contribute to apathy in Parkinson's disease through the precision of expected outcomes.PLoS computational biology · 2022Trial
- Catecholaminergic modulation of the cost of cognitive control in healthy older adults.PloS one · 2020Trial
- Distinct Roles of Dopamine and Noradrenaline in Incidental Memory.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2019Trial
- Beta-Blocker Propranolol Modulates Decision Urgency During Sequential Information Gathering.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2018Trial
- Type-1 and type-2 decisions feature computational noise of similar magnitude.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- Confidence in naturalistic decision making.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2026Article
- Cortical Microstructural Variations Correlate With Individual Differences in Gamified Exploration-Exploitation Behaviours.Computational psychiatry (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2026Article
- Switching the motor response weakens confidence serial dependence.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Article
- Metacognitive Feelings: A Predictive-Processing Perspective.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2025Review
- Noradrenergic and Dopaminergic modulation of meta-cognition and meta-control.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- The moderating role of COMT gene rs4680 polymorphism between maladaptive metacognitive beliefs and negative symptoms in patients with schizophrenia.BMC psychiatry · 2024Article
- Pharmacological Elevation of Catecholamine Levels Improves Perceptual Decisions, But Not Metacognitive Insight.eNeuro · 2024Article
- Hot metacognition: poorer metacognitive efficiency following acute but not traumatic stress.Translational psychiatry · 2024Article
- In the Body's Eye: The computational anatomy of interoceptive inference.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- Partially Overlapping Neural Correlates of Metacognitive Monitoring and Metacognitive Control.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2022Article
- Math anxiety relates positively to metacognitive insight into mathematical decision making.Psychological research · 2022Article
- Exploring Clinical Correlates of Metacognition in Bipolar Disorders Using Moderation Analyses: The Role of Antipsychotics.Journal of clinical medicine · 2021Article
- Computational models link cellular mechanisms of neuromodulation to large-scale neural dynamics.Nature neuroscience · 2021Review
- Human complex exploration strategies are enriched by noradrenaline-modulated heuristics.eLife · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Impairments in metacognition, the ability to accurately report one's performance, are common in patients with psychiatric disorders, where a putative neuromodulatory dysregulation provides the rationale for pharmacological interventions. Previously, we have shown how unexpected arousal modulates metacognition (Allen et al., 2016). Here, we report a double-blind, placebo-controlled, study that examined specific effects of noradrenaline and dopamine on both metacognition and perceptual decision making. Signal theoretic analysis of a global motion discrimination task with adaptive performance staircasing revealed that noradrenergic blockade (40 mg propranolol) significantly increased metacognitive performance (type-II area under the curve, AUROC2), but had no impact on perceptual decision making performance. Blockade of dopamine D2/3 receptors (400 mg amisulpride) had no effect on either metacognition or perceptual decision making. Our study is the first to show a pharmacological enhancement of metacognitive performance, in the absence of any effect on perceptual decision making. This enhancement points to a regulatory role for noradrenergic neurotransmission in perceptual metacognition.
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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.