ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2019
Endogenous fluctuations in the dopaminergic midbrain drive behavioral choice variability.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 34 papers.
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Who cites it
34 citing papers in PubMed, 58 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Drops in confidence precede symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Closed-loop readout of anterior insula high-gamma activity steers value-based decisions.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Developmental variation in basal ganglia tissue iron, neurocognitive functioning, and impulsivity is associated with substance use trajectories in youth.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Microstimulation of the human dopaminergic midbrain enhances outcome-related happiness and reduces loss seeking.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Real-time fMRI-triggered experience-sampling: a proof-of-concept study.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Indecision and recency-weighted evidence integration in non-clinical and clinical settings.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Sense of agency and decision making.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Developmental variation in dopamine neurobiology, neurocognitive functioning, and impulsivity shape substance use trajectories in youth.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Pre-choice midbrain fluctuations affect self-control in food choice: A functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2025Article
- Day-to-day fluctuations in motivation drive effort-based decision-making.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Mating proximity blinds threat perception.Nature · 2024Article
- Surprising sounds influence risky decision making.Nature communications · 2024Article
- State-dependent connectivity in auditory-reward networks predicts peak pleasure experiences to music.PLoS biology · 2024Article
- Risk-Taking Is Associated with Decreased Subjective Value Signals and Increased Prediction Error Signals in the Hot Columbia Card Task.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Article
- Dynamic computational phenotyping of human cognition.Nature human behaviour · 2024Article
- Article
- The Mesocortical System Encodes the Strength of Subsequent Force Generation.Neuroscience insights · 2024Article
- Individual risk attitudes arise from noise in neurocognitive magnitude representations.Nature human behaviour · 2023Article
- Risk taking for potential losses but not gains increases with time of day.Scientific reports · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Human behavior is surprisingly variable, even when facing the same problem under identical circumstances. A prominent example is risky decision making. Economic theories struggle to explain why humans are so inconsistent. Resting-state studies suggest that ongoing endogenous fluctuations in brain activity can influence low-level perceptual and motor processes, but it remains unknown whether endogenous fluctuations also influence high-level cognitive processes including decision making. Here, using real-time functional magnetic resonance imaging, we tested whether risky decision making is influenced by endogenous fluctuations in blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) activity in the dopaminergic midbrain, encompassing ventral tegmental area and substantia nigra. We show that low prestimulus brain activity leads to increased risky choice in humans. Using computational modeling, we show that increased risk taking is explained by enhanced phasic responses to offers in a decision network. Our findings demonstrate that endogenous brain activity provides a physiological basis for variability in complex human behavior.
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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.