ArticleScience (New York, N.Y.)2020
Dopamine promotes cognitive effort by biasing the benefits versus costs of cognitive work.
Article in Science (New York, N.Y.), 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 188 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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.
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
188 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Differential Associations of Dopamine and Serotonin With Reward and Punishment Processes in Humans: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.JAMA psychiatry · 2025Pooled it
- Dopaminergic modulation of reward discounting in healthy rats: a systematic review and meta-analysis.Psychopharmacology · 2021Pooled it
- Effects of methamphetamine on human effort task performance are unrelated to its subjective effects.Psychopharmacology · 2026Trial
- Dopamine and Temporal Discounting: Revisiting Pharmacology and Individual Differences.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Trial
- Individual differences in dopamine-related traits influence mood effects of dopamine D2-antagonist and antidepressant treatment expectations.The international journal of neuropsychopharmacology · 2025Trial
- Methamphetamine-induced adaptation of learning rate dynamics depend on baseline performance.eLife · 2025Trial
- A randomized proof-of-mechanism trial of TNF antagonism for motivational deficits and related corticostriatal circuitry in depressed patients with high inflammation.Molecular psychiatry · 2025Trial
- Noninvasive Brain Stimulation over the Frontopolar Cortex Promotes Willingness to Exert Cognitive Effort in a Foraging-Like Sequential Choice Task.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Trial
- Catecholaminergic Modulation of Large-Scale Network Dynamics Is Tied to the Reconfiguration of Corticostriatal Connectivity.Human brain mapping · 2024Trial
- Cognitive control training with domain-general response inhibition does not change children's brains or behavior.Nature neuroscience · 2024Trial
- Effects of dopamine and opioid receptor antagonism on the neural processing of social and nonsocial rewards.Human brain mapping · 2024Trial
- Methylphenidate undermines or enhances divergent creativity depending on baseline dopamine synthesis capacity.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2023Trial
- The catecholamine precursor Tyrosine reduces autonomic arousal and decreases decision thresholds in reinforcement learning and temporal discounting.PLoS computational biology · 2022Trial
- Trial
- Catecholaminergic Modulation of Semantic Processing in Sentence Comprehension.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2020Trial
- Executive functions as a transdiagnostic endophenotype in developmental psychopathology.Molecular psychiatry · 2026Review
- Motivation to exert effort dynamically adapts to reward context and environmental controllability.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- The effects of increasing and decreasing dopamine on inhibition of return: a psychopharmacological investigation.Experimental brain research · 2026Article
- Changing the motivation for mental work with temporal interference stimulation.Translational psychiatry · 2026Article
- Article
128 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Stimulants such as methylphenidate are increasingly used for cognitive enhancement but precise mechanisms are unknown. We found that methylphenidate boosts willingness to expend cognitive effort by altering the benefit-to-cost ratio of cognitive work. Willingness to expend effort was greater for participants with higher striatal dopamine synthesis capacity, whereas methylphenidate and sulpiride, a selective D2 receptor antagonist, increased cognitive motivation more for participants with lower synthesis capacity. A sequential sampling model informed by momentary gaze revealed that decisions to expend effort are related to amplification of benefit-versus-cost information attended early in the decision process, whereas the effect of benefits is strengthened with higher synthesis capacity and by methylphenidate. These findings demonstrate that methylphenidate boosts the perceived benefits versus costs of cognitive effort by modulating striatal dopamine signaling.
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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.