ArticleThe Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience2021
Attenuated Directed Exploration during Reinforcement Learning in Gambling Disorder.
Article in The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 29 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
29 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 57 citations in OpenAlex.
- A review on exploration-exploitation trade-off in psychiatric disorders.BMC psychiatry · 2025Pooled it
- 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
- Competing value signals impair reward-learning via dopaminergic mechanisms and increase exploration.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Ventrolateral prefrontal cortex in macaques guides decisions in different learning conditions.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Recurrent Neural Network Exploration Strategies During Reinforcement Learning Depend on Network Capacity.Computational brain & behavior · 2026Article
- Diminishing loss sensitivity during risky decision-making among male individuals with gambling disorder.Journal of behavioral addictions · 2026Article
- Disrupted decision making in adult male rats after prolonged withdrawal from ethanol vapor exposure.Alcohol, clinical & experimental research · 2025Article
- Computational mechanisms underlying the impact of Pavlovian bias on instrumental learning in problematic social media users.Journal of behavioral addictions · 2025Article
- Beyond reward learning deficits: Exploration-exploitation instability reveals computational heterogeneity in value-based decision making in early psychosis.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2025Article
- Chronic ethanol exposure produces sex-dependent impairments in value computations in the striatum.Science advances · 2025Article
- Meta-Analysis Reveals That Explore-Exploit Decisions are Dissociable by Activation in the Dorsal Lateral Prefrontal Cortex, Anterior Insula, and the Dorsal Anterior Cingulate Cortex.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- The Effect of Reward Magnitude on Different Types of Exploration in Human Reinforcement Learning.Computational brain & behavior · 2025Article
- Chronic Ethanol Exposure Produces Persistent Impairment in Cognitive Flexibility and Decision Signals in the Striatum.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Computational and Neural Evidence for Altered Fast and Slow Learning from Losses in Problem Gambling.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Signatures of Perseveration and Heuristic-Based Directed Exploration in Two-Step Sequential Decision Task Behaviour.Computational psychiatry (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Multiple and subject-specific roles of uncertainty in reward-guided decision-making.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Exploration-Exploitation Mechanisms in Recurrent Neural Networks and Human Learners in Restless Bandit Problems.Computational brain & behavior · 2024Article
- Impaired value-based decision-making in Parkinson's disease apathy.Brain : a journal of neurology · 2024Article
- Learning and metacognition under volatility in GD: Lower learning rates and distorted coupling between action and confidence.Journal of behavioral addictions · 2024Article
- Differential impacts of healthy cognitive aging on directed and random exploration.Psychology and aging · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Gambling disorder (GD) is a behavioral addiction associated with impairments in value-based decision-making and behavioral flexibility and might be linked to changes in the dopamine system. Maximizing long-term rewards requires a flexible trade-off between the exploitation of known options and the exploration of novel options for information gain. This exploration-exploitation trade-off is thought to depend on dopamine neurotransmission. We hypothesized that human gamblers would show a reduction in directed (uncertainty-based) exploration, accompanied by changes in brain activity in a fronto-parietal exploration-related network. Twenty-three frequent, non-treatment seeking gamblers and twenty-three healthy matched controls (all male) performed a four-armed bandit task during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Computational modeling using hierarchical Bayesian parameter estimation revealed signatures of directed exploration, random exploration, and perseveration in both groups. Gamblers showed a reduction in directed exploration, whereas random exploration and perseveration were similar between groups. Neuroimaging revealed no evidence for group differences in neural representations of basic task variables (expected value, prediction errors). Our hypothesis of reduced frontal pole (FP) recruitment in gamblers was not supported. Exploratory analyses showed that during directed exploration, gamblers showed reduced parietal cortex and substantia-nigra/ventral-tegmental-area activity. Cross-validated classification analyses revealed that connectivity in an exploration-related network was predictive of group status, suggesting that connectivity patterns might be more predictive of problem gambling than univariate effects. Findings reveal specific reductions of strategic exploration in gamblers that might be linked to altered processing in a fronto-parietal network and/or changes in dopamine neurotransmission implicated in GD.
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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.