ArticleNeuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology2020
Modafinil enhances cognitive, but not emotional conflict processing via enhanced inferior frontal gyrus activation and its communication with the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex.
Article in Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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
9 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 22 citations in OpenAlex.
- Neural systems underlying autobiographical memory dysregulations in depression: A neuroimaging meta-analysis.Psychological medicine · 2025Pooled it
- Common and distinct neurofunctional signatures of dynamic naturalistic emotion regulation strategies.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Dissociable Neural Connectome Mapping of Reward and Punishment Responsiveness in Young Adults: Associations with Genetic Variability and Neurotransmitter Profiles.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Stable interindividual differences in modafinil's effect on vigilance during sleep deprivation.Frontiers in pharmacology · 2025Article
- The right inferior frontal gyrus as pivotal node and effective regulator of the basal ganglia-thalamocortical response inhibition circuit.Psychoradiology · 2023Article
- Effect of Modafinil on functional connectivity in healthy young people using resting-state fMRI data.American journal of neurodegenerative disease · 2022Article
- Evaluation of the Effect of Modafinil on Respiratory and Cerebral Outcomes after Coronary Artery Bypass Graft Surgery.ARYA atherosclerosis · 2021Article
- Ketamine Normalizes the Structural Alterations of Inferior Frontal Gyrus in Depression.Chronic stress (Thousand Oaks, Calif.)Article
- Transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation enhanced emotional inhibitory control via increasing intrinsic prefrontal couplings.International journal of clinical and health psychology : IJCHPArticle
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
10 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Cognitive control regulates cognitive and emotional systems to facilitate goal-directed behavior in the context of task-irrelevant distractors. Cognitive control deficits contribute to residual functional impairments across psychiatric disorders and represent a promising novel treatment target. Translational evidence suggests that modafinil may enhance performance in executive functions; however, differential effects on regulatory control in cognitive and emotional domains have not been examined. The present pre-registered randomized-controlled pharmacological fMRI trial examined differential effects of modafinil (single-dose, 200 mg) on cognitive and emotional conflict processing. To further separate objective cognitive enhancing effects from subjective performance perception, a metacognitive paradigm was employed. Results indicated that modafinil specifically enhanced cognitive conflict performance and concomitantly increased activation in the inferior frontal gyrus and its functional communication with the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex. Exploratory analysis further revealed modafinil-enhanced basolateral amygdala reactivity to cognitive conflict, with stronger reactivity being associated with higher cognitive conflict performance. Whereas modafinil enhanced cognitive performance in the metacognitive paradigm, confidence indices remained unaffected. Overall, the present results suggest that modafinil has the potential to enhance cognitive conflict processing while leaving emotional conflict processing unaffected. On the neural level modafinil enhanced the recruitment of a network engaged in general conflict and regulatory control processes, whereas effects on the amygdala may reflect improved arousal-mediated attention processes for conflicting information. The pattern of cognitive enhancing effects in the absence of effects on affective processing suggests a promising potential to enhance cognitive control in clinical populations.
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.