ArticleNature human behaviour2022
Stress-sensitive inference of task controllability.
Article in Nature human behaviour, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers.
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Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed.
- Trial
- Motivation to exert effort dynamically adapts to reward context and environmental controllability.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Article
- Uncontrollability of experimental pain decreases pain intensity and relief pleasantness ratings in a between-group design.Pain reports · 2026Article
- Negative Contextual Valence Unmasks Altered Counterfactual Decision-Making in Major Depressive Disorder.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2026Article
- Understanding human metacontrol and its pathologies using deep neural networks.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Sense of control buffers against stress.eLife · 2026Article
- Neural Bases of Affect-Based Impulsivity: A Decision Neuroscience Account.Computational psychiatry (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2026Review
- Active disambiguation guides inferring controllability and cause in social interactions.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Controllability changes pain perception by increasing the precision of expectations.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Neurocomputational mechanisms underlying the distinct motivational influences of reward and punishment on cognitive control.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Article
- A task-invariant prior explains trial-by-trial active avoidance behaviour across gain and loss tasks.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Article
- Article
- Intrinsic motivation for choice varies with individual risk attitudes and the controllability of the environment.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- Learned Helplessness As a Potential Transdiagnostic Therapeutic Mechanism of Classic Psychedelics.Psychedelic medicine (New Rochelle, N.Y.) · 2023Review
- Learning when effort matters: neural dynamics underlying updating and adaptation to changes in performance efficacy.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2023Article
- Transcranial direct-current stimulation enhances Pavlovian tendencies during intermittent loss of control.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2023Article
- Emotions as computations.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2023Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Estimating the controllability of the environment enables agents to better predict upcoming events and decide when to engage controlled action selection. How does the human brain estimate controllability? Trial-by-trial analysis of choices, decision times and neural activity in an explore-and-predict task demonstrate that humans solve this problem by comparing the predictions of an 'actor' model with those of a reduced 'spectator' model of their environment. Neural blood oxygen level-dependent responses within striatal and medial prefrontal areas tracked the instantaneous difference in the prediction errors generated by these two statistical learning models. Blood oxygen level-dependent activity in the posterior cingulate, temporoparietal and prefrontal cortices covaried with changes in estimated controllability. Exposure to inescapable stressors biased controllability estimates downward and increased reliance on the spectator model in an anxiety-dependent fashion. Taken together, these findings provide a mechanistic account of controllability inference and its distortion by stress exposure.
Indexed as
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35273354What 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.