ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
Human decisions about when to act originate within a basal forebrain-nigral circuit.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
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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
19 citing papers in PubMed, 29 citations in OpenAlex.
- Interpretable abstractions of artificial neural networks predict behavior and neural activity during human information gathering.Nature neuroscience · 2026Article
- A brain-wide, trial- and time-dependent deterministic drive synergizes with within-trial noise to time self-initiated actions.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Activity in human dorsal raphe nucleus signals changes in behavioural policy.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Fundamental features of social environments determine rate of social affiliation.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Dorsal raphe nucleus controls motivation-state transitions in monkeys.Science advances · 2025Article
- A distributed subcortical circuit linked to instrumental information-seeking about threat.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Fixational saccade inhibition and pupil dilation during self-paced limb movement preparation.PloS one · 2025Article
- General mechanisms of task engagement in the primate frontal cortex.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Decomposing risky decision-making in methamphetamine use disorder: Behavioral updating and D2 dopamine receptors.Drug and alcohol dependence · 2023Article
- Obsessive-compulsive disorder is characterized by decreased Pavlovian influence on instrumental behavior.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- Review
- Microstructural imaging and transcriptomics of the basal forebrain in first-episode psychosis.Translational psychiatry · 2022Article
- Complementary roles of serotonergic and cholinergic systems in decisions about when to act.Current biology : CB · 2022Article
- Integrating Reward Information for Prospective Behavior.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2022Article
- A habenula-insular circuit encodes the willingness to act.Nature communications · 2021Article
- What Is the Readiness Potential?Trends in cognitive sciences · 2021Review
- Anterior Cingulate Cortex and the Control of Dynamic Behavior in Primates.Current biology : CB · 2020Review
- Human decisions about when to act originate within a basal forebrain-nigral circuit.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- Basal Forebrain Modulation of Olfactory CodingInternational journal of psychological researchArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Decisions about when to act are critical for survival in humans as in animals, but how a desire is translated into the decision that an action is worth taking at any particular point in time is incompletely understood. Here we show that a simple model developed to explain when animals decide it is worth taking an action also explains a significant portion of the variance in timing observed when humans take voluntary actions. The model focuses on the current environment's potential for reward, the timing of the individual's own recent actions, and the outcomes of those actions. We show, by using ultrahigh-field MRI scanning, that in addition to anterior cingulate cortex within medial frontal cortex, a group of subcortical structures including striatum, substantia nigra, basal forebrain (BF), pedunculopontine nucleus (PPN), and habenula (HB) encode trial-by-trial variation in action time. Further analysis of the activity patterns found in each area together with psychophysiological interaction analysis and structural equation modeling suggested a model in which BF integrates contextual information that will influence the decision about when to act and communicates this information, in parallel with PPN and HB influences, to nigrostriatal circuits. It is then in the nigrostriatal circuit that action initiation per se begins.
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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.