ArticleCognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience2018
Pure correlates of exploration and exploitation in the human brain.
Article in Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience, 2018. 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.
- Disentangling the roles of dopamine and noradrenaline in the exploration-exploitation tradeoff during human decision-making.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2023Trial
- Novelty-seeking and directed exploration scale with dissociable social network outcomes and brain systems in older adults.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Spatiotemporal Decoding of Explore-Exploit Decisions in the Human Brain.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Stochastic choice drives variability in patch foraging decisions in humans and rats.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- Understanding human metacontrol and its pathologies using deep neural networks.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Default mode network activity is related to efficiency in a combined motion error and gambling task.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- No effect of preliminarily simulated cathodal HD-tDCS on the frontopolar cortex in the exploration-exploitation task.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Article
- 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
- Troubleshooting Bayesian cognitive models.Psychological methods · 2025Article
- Testing the convergent validity, domain generality, and temporal stability of selected measures of people's tendency to explore.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Article
- Modelling cognitive flexibility with deep neural networks.Current opinion in behavioral sciences · 2024Article
- The explore/exploit trade-off: An ecologically valid and translational framework that can advance mechanistic understanding of eating disorders.The International journal of eating disorders · 2024Article
- Reward-based option competition in human dorsal stream and transition from stochastic exploration to exploitation in continuous space.Science advances · 2024Article
- 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
- Decomposing decision-making in preschoolers: Making decisions under ambiguity versus risk.PloS one · 2024Article
- Energy-aware bio-inspired spiking reinforcement learning system architecture for real-time autonomous edge applications.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2024Article
- Interindividual Brain and Behavior Differences in Adaptation to Unexpected Uncertainty.Biology · 2023Article
- Article
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2 authors.
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Abstract
Balancing exploration and exploitation is a fundamental problem in reinforcement learning. Previous neuroimaging studies of the exploration-exploitation dilemma could not completely disentangle these two processes, making it difficult to unambiguously identify their neural signatures. We overcome this problem using a task in which subjects can either observe (pure exploration) or bet (pure exploitation). Insula and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex showed significantly greater activity on observe trials compared to bet trials, suggesting that these regions play a role in driving exploration. A model-based analysis of task performance suggested that subjects chose to observe until a critical evidence threshold was reached. We observed a neural signature of this evidence accumulation process in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. These findings support theories positing an important role for anterior cingulate cortex in exploration, while also providing a new perspective on the roles of insula and ventromedial prefrontal cortex.
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