ReviewNature neuroscience2018
What does dopamine mean?
Review in Nature neuroscience, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 426 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
426 citing papers in PubMed, 925 citations in OpenAlex.
- Dopamine D2-receptor blockade in humans disrupts the effect of effort on learning.PLoS biology · 2026Trial
- Effects of antipsychotics on human cognitive function: causal evidence from healthy volunteers following sustained D2/D3 antagonism, D2/D3 partial agonism and placebo.Molecular psychiatry · 2025Trial
- Liraglutide restores impaired associative learning in individuals with obesity.Nature metabolism · 2023Trial
- Dopamine modulation of motor and implicit learning contributions to auditory temporal attention.iScience · 2026Article
- Altered striatal dopamine regulation in Adgrl3 knockout mice.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2026Article
- Vitamin A deficiency induces sex-specific reward processing alterations through a dysregulation of the mesolimbic dopamine transmission in mice.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2026Article
- Coordinated yet asymmetric striatal neuromodulatory dynamics encode associative learning.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Cell-type-specific disruption of nucleus accumbens social representations in a mouse model of autism.Neuron · 2026Article
- Dopamine inhibits retinal pathological neovascularization in the oxygen-induced retinopathy mouse model.The Journal of pathology · 2026Article
- Calbindin stratifies midbrain dopaminergic neurons governing distinct aspects of locomotion.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- The multilevel exploration test, a novel paradigm to measure exploratory behavior in depression animal models and the involvement of the PL-ZI circuit.Acta pharmacologica Sinica · 2026Article
- Multicenter retrospective study on perceived effectiveness, reported side effects, and cognitive outcomes of SSRIs in 22q11.2 deletion syndrome.European child & adolescent psychiatry · 2026Article
- The Cellular and Synaptic Actions of Dopamine During Behavior.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Network Pharmacology Reveals the Potential Mechanism of Ketamine in Improving Cognitive Impairment in Patients With Depression.Alpha psychiatry · 2026Article
- The Synaptic Vesicle Priming Protein Munc13 Mediates Evoked Somatodendritic Dopamine Release.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- Striatal dopamine signals internal states related to behavioral performance over prolonged timescales in monkeys.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Chronic ethanol self-administration alters dopamine in the caudate nucleus and putamen of rhesus macaques in a sex-dependent manner.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2026Article
- Prediction error correlates in the striosome-dopamine circuit emerge from information gain.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Dopamine projections to the basolateral amygdala enable reward prediction.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Midbrain endocannabinoids actuate dopamine-based action selection.Cell reports · 2026Article
366 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
1 author at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Dopamine is a critical modulator of both learning and motivation. This presents a problem: how can target cells know whether increased dopamine is a signal to learn or to move? It is often presumed that motivation involves slow ('tonic') dopamine changes, while fast ('phasic') dopamine fluctuations convey reward prediction errors for learning. Yet recent studies have shown that dopamine conveys motivational value and promotes movement even on subsecond timescales. Here I describe an alternative account of how dopamine regulates ongoing behavior. Dopamine release related to motivation is rapidly and locally sculpted by receptors on dopamine terminals, independently from dopamine cell firing. Target neurons abruptly switch between learning and performance modes, with striatal cholinergic interneurons providing one candidate switch mechanism. The behavioral impact of dopamine varies by subregion, but in each case dopamine provides a dynamic estimate of whether it is worth expending a limited internal resource, such as energy, attention, or time.
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.