ArticlePLoS biology2021
Locus coeruleus neurons encode the subjective difficulty of triggering and executing actions.
Article in PLoS biology, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 32 papers.
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Who cites it
32 citing papers in PubMed.
- Pharmacological and pupillary evidence for the noradrenergic contribution to reinforcement learning in Parkinson's disease.Communications biology · 2025Trial
- Top-down control of sustained attention by medial prefrontal cortex-locus coeruleus (mPFC-LC) projection neurons during the rodent continuous performance test (rCPT).Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2026Article
- Fluctuations in arousal reflect latent state transitions that facilitate behavioural optimization.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Arousal shapes motivation: an integrative framework for understanding motivational deficits.Translational psychiatry · 2026Review
- Integrating arousal and valence approaches to advance cognitive effort research.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Review
- The role of the locus coeruleus in eye movements during perceptual decision making.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Pupil dilation as a marker of attention/effort in aging and mild cognitive impairment.Alzheimer's & dementia : the journal of the Alzheimer's Association · 2026Article
- Lateral habenula and periaqueductal gray neurons signal reward prediction error and continuity of reward expectancy to drive reward-seeking behavior.Cell reports · 2026Article
- From chemistry to cognition: the adaptive origins of consciousness under constraint.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2026Article
- Top-down control of sustained attention by the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) - locus coeruleus (LC) circuit during the rodent continuous performance test (rCPT).bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Low affinity noradrenergic signaling promotes passive coping during reinforcement behavior.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- An early surge of norepinephrine along brainstem pathways drives sensory-evoked awakening.Science advances · 2025Article
- Age-Related Increase in Locus Ceruleus Activity and Connectivity with the Prefrontal Cortex during Ambiguity Processing.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Mobilizing effort to reduce lapses of sustained attention: examining the effects of content-free cues, feedback, and points.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2025Article
- Article
- A possible pathway to freezing of gait in Parkinson's disease.Journal of Parkinson's disease · 2025Article
- Constructing a risk screen for attention difficulty in U.S. adults using six machine learning methods.Frontiers in artificial intelligence · 2025Article
- Dynamically Controlled Flight Altitudes in Robo-Pigeons viaResearch (Washington, D.C.) · 2025Article
- Noradrenergic alpha-2a receptor stimulation enhances prediction error signaling and updating of attention sets in anterior cingulate cortex and striatum.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Emerging Functions of Neuromodulation during Sleep.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Review
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Abstract
The brain stem noradrenergic nucleus locus coeruleus (LC) is involved in various costly processes: arousal, stress, and attention. Recent work has pointed toward an implication in physical effort, and indirect evidence suggests that the LC could be also involved in cognitive effort. To assess the dynamic relation between LC activity, effort production, and difficulty, we recorded the activity of 193 LC single units in 5 monkeys performing 2 discounting tasks (a delay discounting task and a force discounting task), as well as a simpler target detection task where conditions were matched for difficulty and only differed in terms of sensory-motor processes. First, LC neurons displayed a transient activation both when monkeys initiated an action and when exerting force. Second, the magnitude of the activation scaled with the associated difficulty, and, potentially, the corresponding amount of effort produced, both for decision and force production. Indeed, at action initiation in both discounting tasks, LC activation increased in conditions associated with lower average engagement rate, i.e., those requiring more cognitive control to trigger the response. Decision-related activation also scaled with response time (RT), over and above task parameters, in line with the idea that it reflects the amount of resources (here time) spent on the decision process. During force production, LC activation only scaled with the amount of force produced in the force discounting task, but not in the control target detection task, where subjective difficulty was equivalent across conditions. Our data show that LC neurons dynamically track the amount of effort produced to face both cognitive and physical challenges with a subsecond precision. This works provides key insight into effort processing and the contribution of the noradrenergic system, which is affected in several pathologies where effort is impaired, including Parkinson disease and depression.
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