ArticleScientific reports2020
Signals of anticipation of reward and of mean reward rates in the human brain.
Article in Scientific reports, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
What it found
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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.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed, 15 citations in OpenAlex.
- Interferon-beta-induced changes in neuroimaging phenotypes of appetitive motivation and reactivity to emotional salience.NeuroImage. Clinical · 2019Trial
- Functional imaging of time on task and the involvement of dopaminergic and cholinergic substrates in cognitive effort and reward.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Sexual Dimorphisms in Neurodevelopment May Affect TBI Recovery in Pediatric Patients.Biomedicines · 2025Review
- Superior Colliculus Projections Drive Dopamine Neuron Activity and Movement But Not Value.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Treatment-resistant recurrent unipolar and bipolar depression: associative learning abnormalities.Brain : a journal of neurology · 2025Article
- Superior colliculus projections drive dopamine neuron activity and movement but not value.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- New diagnosis in psychiatry: beyond heuristics.Psychological medicine · 2025Review
- Your smile won't affect me: Association between childhood maternal antipathy and adult neural reward function in a transdiagnostic sample.Translational psychiatry · 2023Article
- Neuropsychiatric Model of Addiction Simplified.The Psychiatric clinics of North America · 2022Review
- Effects of genetic variability of CYP2D6 on neural substrates of sustained attention during on-task activity.Translational psychiatry · 2020Article
- Basal forebrain and neural correlates of self-regulation traits in sustained attention.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.)Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
8 authors at 4 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Theoretical models of dopamine function stemming from reinforcement learning theory have emphasized the importance of prediction errors, which signal changes in the expectation of impending rewards. Much less is known about the effects of mean reward rates, which may be of motivational significance due to their role in computing the optimal effort put into exploiting reward opportunities. Here, we used a reinforcement learning model to design three functional neuroimaging studies and disentangle the effects of changes in reward expectations and mean reward rates, showing recruitment of specific regions in the brainstem regardless of prediction errors. While changes in reward expectations activated ventral striatal areas as in previous studies, mean reward rates preferentially modulated the substantia nigra/ventral tegmental area, deep layers of the superior colliculi, and a posterior pontomesencephalic region. These brainstem structures may work together to set motivation and attentional efforts levels according to perceived reward opportunities.
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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.