Trial reportNeuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology2021
Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and the explore/exploit trade-off.
Trial report in Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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
18 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 44 citations in OpenAlex.
- Differential Associations of Dopamine and Serotonin With Reward and Punishment Processes in Humans: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.JAMA psychiatry · 2025Pooled it
- A review on exploration-exploitation trade-off in psychiatric disorders.BMC psychiatry · 2025Pooled it
- Cognitive modeling of real-world behavior for understanding mental health.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2026Review
- Executive and motivational pathways to ADHD traits in the general population: a structural equation model of working memory, attention, delay discounting, and decision-making.BMC psychology · 2026Article
- Individual differences in sequential decision-making.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Gaze dynamics during natural scene memorization and recognition.Cognition · 2025Article
- The curious interpretation of novel object recognition tests.Trends in neurosciences · 2025Review
- Hyperactive ADHD symptoms are associated with increased variability in thought content in less constrained contexts.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Troubleshooting Bayesian cognitive models.Psychological methods · 2025Article
- Anterior insular cortex glutamate-glutamine (Glx) levels predict general psychopathology via heightened error sensitivity.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2025Article
- Decrease in decision noise from adolescence into adulthood mediates an increase in more sophisticated choice behaviors and performance gain.PLoS biology · 2024Article
- Dopamine and Norepinephrine Differentially Mediate the Exploration-Exploitation Tradeoff.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Article
- Multiple and subject-specific roles of uncertainty in reward-guided decision-making.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Exploring the steps of learning: computational modeling of initiatory-actions among individuals with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.Translational psychiatry · 2024Article
- How does apathy impact exploration-exploitation decision-making in older patients with neurocognitive disorders?npj aging · 2023Article
- Decision flexibilities in autism spectrum disorder: an fMRI study of moral dilemmas.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2022Article
- Striatal dopamine dissociates methylphenidate effects on value-based versus surprise-based reversal learning.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Sex differences in learning from exploration.eLife · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The ability to maximize rewards and minimize the costs of obtaining them is vital to making advantageous explore/exploit decisions. Exploratory decisions are theorized to be greater among individuals with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), potentially due to deficient catecholamine transmission. Here, we examined the effects of ADHD status and methylphenidate, a common ADHD medication, on explore/exploit decisions using a 6-armed bandit task. We hypothesized that ADHD participants would make more exploratory decisions than controls, and that MPH would reduce group differences. On separate study days, adults with (n = 26) and without (n = 23) ADHD completed the bandit task at baseline, and after methylphenidate or placebo in counter-balanced order. Explore/exploit decisions were modeled using reinforcement learning algorithms. ADHD participants made more exploratory decisions (i.e., chose options without the highest expected reward value) and earned fewer points than controls in all three study days, and methylphenidate did not affect these outcomes. Baseline exploratory choices were positively associated with hyperactive ADHD symptoms across all participants. These results support several theoretical models of increased exploratory choices in ADHD and suggest the unexplained variance in ADHD decisions may be due to less value tracking. The inability to suppress actions with little to no reward value may be a key feature of hyperactive ADHD symptoms.
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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.