ArticleHuman brain mapping2020
Causal role of lateral prefrontal cortex in mental effort and fatigue.
Article in Human brain mapping, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 33 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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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
33 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- The neural basis of cost-benefit trade-offs in effort investment: a quantitative activation likelihood estimation meta-analysis.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Pooled it
- Anti-saccade error rates are associated with somatic depressive symptoms in cocaine use disorder.Journal of psychopharmacology (Oxford, England) · 2026Trial
- Triangular Wave tACS Improves Working Memory Performance by Enhancing Brain Activity in the Early Stage of Encoding.Neuroscience bulletin · 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
- Causal role of frontal-midline theta in cognitive effort: a pilot study.Journal of neurophysiology · 2021Trial
- Obesity is associated with greater variability of reward signals in the nucleus accumbens.Translational psychiatry · 2026Article
- Chronotherapeutic administration of neoadjuvant chemotherapy reduces cancer-related fatigue-like behavior.Brain, behavior, & immunity - health · 2026Article
- The impact of mental fatigue on drop landing injury risk and lower limb asymmetry in elite collegiate american football players.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Computational signatures of exertion and rest underlie moment-to-moment dynamics of subjective perceptions of effort and fatigue.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 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
- Understanding mechanisms of voluntary engagement of mental effort using active inference.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Case Report: Anodal DLPFC-tDCS for refractory post-traumatic cognitive fatigue in the hypometabolic brain.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2026Article
- Neural mechanisms underlying implicit emotion regulation deficit in relational and nonrelational trauma PTSD: Insights from the Nested Hierarchical Model of Self.Psychological medicine · 2025Article
- Dysfunction in primate dorsolateral prefrontal area 46 affects motivation and anxiety.Science (New York, N.Y.) · 2025Article
- Effects of Different Numbers of Trials on Saccadometry Test Results.Brain and behavior · 2025Article
- The Effect of Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation on Basketball Performance-A Scoping Review.Journal of clinical medicine · 2025Review
- A neurometabolic mechanism involving dmPFC/dACC lactate in physical effort-based decision-making.Molecular psychiatry · 2025Article
- Exaggerated frontoparietal control over cognitive effort-based decision-making in young women with anorexia nervosa.Molecular psychiatry · 2025Article
- Personalized neural responses to self and filial reward: Functional and structural responses to motivational cues.AIMS neuroscience · 2025Article
- Sex differences in the effects of mental fatigue on single-leg drop landing biomechanics among sport science university students.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) is well-known for its role in exerting mental work, however the contribution of DLPFC for deciding whether or not to engage in effort remains unknown. Here, we assessed the causal role of DLPFC in effort-based decision making. We disrupted functioning of DLPFC with noninvasive brain stimulation before participants repeatedly decided whether to exert mental effort in a working memory task. We found the same DLPFC subregion involved in mental effort exertion to influence also effort-based decisions: First, it enhanced effort discounting, suggesting that DLPFC may signal the capacity to successfully deal with effort demands. Second, a novel computational model integrating the costs of enduring effort into the effort-based decision process revealed that DLPFC disruption reduced fatigue after accumulated effort exertion, linking DLPFC activation with fatigue. Together, our findings indicate that in effort-based decisions DLPFC represents the capacity to exert mental effort and the updating of this information with enduring time-on-task, informing theoretical accounts on the role of DLPFC in the motivation to exert mental effort and the fatigue arising from it.
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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.