ArticleNature communications2021
A habenula-insular circuit encodes the willingness to act.
Article in Nature communications, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers.
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Who cites it
22 citing papers in PubMed.
- Interpretable abstractions of artificial neural networks predict behavior and neural activity during human information gathering.Nature neuroscience · 2026Article
- Article
- Negative correlation between habenular volume and duration of gambling disorder: Modulation by symptom severity and personality traits.Journal of behavioral addictions · 2026Article
- A brain-wide, trial- and time-dependent deterministic drive synergizes with within-trial noise to time self-initiated actions.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Activity in human dorsal raphe nucleus signals changes in behavioural policy.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Humans are more prosocial in poor foraging environments.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Active disambiguation guides inferring controllability and cause in social interactions.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Exposure to early-life stress uncovers shared biological signatures underlying vulnerability in the habenula and insular cortex of male and female adult rats.Neurobiology of stress · 2025Article
- Fundamental features of social environments determine rate of social affiliation.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Dorsal raphe nucleus controls motivation-state transitions in monkeys.Science advances · 2025Article
- Clinical implications of pineal cyst resection in the absence of hydrocephalus or clear neurological signs: a case series.Neurosurgical review · 2025Article
- Habenula contributions to negative self-cognitions.Nature communications · 2025Article
- The brain's action-mode network.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2025Review
- A distributed subcortical circuit linked to instrumental information-seeking about threat.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- General mechanisms of task engagement in the primate frontal cortex.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Lifelong learning of cognitive styles for physical problem-solving: The effect of embodied experience.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2024Article
- A neural mechanism for conserved value computations integrating information and rewards.Nature neuroscience · 2024Article
- Beyond Avoiding Hemiplegia after Glioma Surgery: The Need to Map Complex Movement in Awake Patient to Preserve Conation.Cancers · 2023Review
- Preferences for seeking effort or reward information bias the willingness to work.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Review
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The decision that it is worth doing something rather than nothing is a core yet understudied feature of voluntary behaviour. Here we study "willingness to act", the probability of making a response given the context. Human volunteers encountered opportunities to make effortful actions in order to receive rewards, while watching a movie inside a 7 T MRI scanner. Reward and other context features determined willingness-to-act. Activity in the habenula tracked trial-by-trial variation in participants' willingness-to-act. The anterior insula encoded individual environment features that determined this willingness. We identify a multi-layered network in which contextual information is encoded in the anterior insula, converges on the habenula, and is then transmitted to the supplementary motor area, where the decision is made to either act or refrain from acting via the nigrostriatal pathway.
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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.