Trial reporteLife2020
A selective effect of dopamine on information-seeking.
Trial report in eLife, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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
13 citing papers in PubMed, 37 citations in OpenAlex.
- Trial
- Trial
- Dopamine depletion in Parkinson's increases directed but not random exploration.Science advances · 2026Article
- Why do we seek information about the future? On the origins of subjective value without instrumental value.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Active information sampling in health and disease.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2025Review
- Three diverse motives for information sharing.Communications psychology · 2024Article
- "How" web searches change under stress.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- A neural mechanism for conserved value computations integrating information and rewards.Nature neuroscience · 2024Article
- Contributions of expected learning progress and perceptual novelty to curiosity-driven exploration.Cognition · 2022Article
- Article
- Anxiety increases information-seeking in response to large changes.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Independent and interacting value systems for reward and information in the human brain.eLife · 2022Article
- Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Humans are motivated to seek information from their environment. How the brain motivates this behavior is unknown. One speculation is that the brain employs neuromodulatory systems implicated in primary reward-seeking, in particular dopamine, to instruct information-seeking. However, there has been no causal test for the role of dopamine in information-seeking. Here, we show that administration of a drug that enhances dopamine function (dihydroxy-L-phenylalanine; L-DOPA) reduces the impact of valence on information-seeking. Specifically, while participants under Placebo sought more information about potential gains than losses, under L-DOPA this difference was not observed. The results provide new insight into the neurobiology of information-seeking and generates the prediction that abnormal dopaminergic function (such as in Parkinson's disease) will result in valence-dependent changes to information-seeking.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.