Trial reportThe Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience2020
Dopamine Modulates Dynamic Decision-Making during Foraging.
Trial report in The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 46 papers, 1 of them a synthesis 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
46 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- A review on exploration-exploitation trade-off in psychiatric disorders.BMC psychiatry · 2025Pooled it
- 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
- Acetylcholine and noradrenaline enhance foraging optimality in humans.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Trial
- Disentangling the roles of dopamine and noradrenaline in the exploration-exploitation tradeoff during human decision-making.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2023Trial
- A multi-pronged investigation of option generation using depression, PET and modafinil.Brain : a journal of neurology · 2022Trial
- The role of oxytocin in delay of gratification and flexibility in non-social decision making.eLife · 2021Trial
- Catecholaminergic modulation of the cost of cognitive control in healthy older adults.PloS one · 2020Trial
- Neurobehavioral differences in value-based decision making between people with cocaine use disorder and controls.Experimental and clinical psychopharmacology · 2026Article
- Stochastic choice drives variability in patch foraging decisions in humans and rats.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- Shared and distinct features of common effort-based decision-making paradigms and their relation to brain structure and neuropsychiatric conditions: An integrated narrative review.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Review
- Humans are more prosocial in poor foraging environments.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Decision context and neurobehavioural disturbance in Huntington's disease.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Characterising negative symptoms in schizophrenia: CHANSS study protocol.BJPsych open · 2025Article
- Foraging as an ethological framework for neuroscience.Trends in neurosciences · 2025Review
- Reward-reset interval timing drives patch foraging decisions through neural state transitions in dorsomedial striatum.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Individual differences in decision-making shape how mesolimbic dopamine regulates choice confidence and change-of-mind.Nature neuroscience · 2025Article
- Balancing Risk and Reward: Dopamine's Central Role in Economic Decision-Making.Brain sciences · 2025Review
- Striatal Dopamine Actions and Movement: Inferences from Parkinson Disease.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Review
- Article
- Increasing Response Vigour Under Time Pressure as a Transdiagnostic Marker of Eating Disorders.Computational psychiatry (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
9 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The mesolimbic dopaminergic system exerts a crucial influence on incentive processing. However, the contribution of dopamine in dynamic, ecological situations where reward rates vary, and decisions evolve over time, remains unclear. In such circumstances, current (foreground) reward accrual needs to be compared continuously with potential rewards that could be obtained by traveling elsewhere (background reward rate), to determine the opportunity cost of staying versus leaving. We hypothesized that dopamine specifically modulates the influence of background, but not foreground, reward information when making a dynamic comparison of these variables for optimal behavior. On a novel foraging task based on an ecological account of animal behavior (marginal value theorem), human participants of either sex decided when to leave locations in situations where foreground rewards depleted at different rates, either in rich or poor environments with high or low background reward rates. In line with theoretical accounts, people's decisions to move from current locations were independently modulated by changes in both foreground and background reward rates. Pharmacological manipulation of dopamine D2 receptor activity using the agonist cabergoline significantly affected decisions to move on, specifically modulating the effect of background reward rates. In particular, when on cabergoline, people left patches in poor environments much earlier. These results demonstrate a role of dopamine in signaling the opportunity cost of rewards, not value per se. Using this ecologically derived framework, we uncover a specific mechanism by which D2 dopamine receptor activity modulates decision-making when foreground and background reward rates are dynamically compared.
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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.