ArticlePLoS computational biology2022
Arousal state affects perceptual decision-making by modulating hierarchical sensory processing in a large-scale visual system model.
Article in PLoS computational biology, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 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
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- Identifying an oculomotor phenotype for adolescent depression with an interleaved pro- and anti-saccade task.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2026Article
- An experimental paradigm to manipulate physiological arousal using consecutive successes.iScience · 2025Article
- Adaptive arousal regulation: Pharmacologically shifting the peak of the Yerkes-Dodson curve by catecholaminergic enhancement of arousal.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Arousal state fluctuations are a source of internal noise underlying age-related declines in speech intelligibility.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Integrating the dual-system theory in motor: dynamic framework construction for motor decision-making.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- A neural basis of choking under pressure.Neuron · 2024Article
- Heightened SAM- and HPA-axis activity during acute stress impairs decision-making: A systematic review on underlying neuropharmacological mechanisms.Neurobiology of stress · 2024Article
- A disinhibitory circuit mechanism explains a general principle of peak performance during mid-level arousal.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Reward Modulates Visual Responses in the Superficial Superior Colliculus of Mice.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2023Article
- Management of the Emergency Airway: Clinical Considerations and Practical Strategies for Resident Physicians.Journal of the West African College of SurgeonsReview
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.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Arousal levels strongly affect task performance. Yet, what arousal level is optimal for a task depends on its difficulty. Easy task performance peaks at higher arousal levels, whereas performance on difficult tasks displays an inverted U-shape relationship with arousal, peaking at medium arousal levels, an observation first made by Yerkes and Dodson in 1908. It is commonly proposed that the noradrenergic locus coeruleus system regulates these effects on performance through a widespread release of noradrenaline resulting in changes of cortical gain. This account, however, does not explain why performance decays with high arousal levels only in difficult, but not in simple tasks. Here, we present a mechanistic model that revisits the Yerkes-Dodson effect from a sensory perspective: a deep convolutional neural network augmented with a global gain mechanism reproduced the same interaction between arousal state and task difficulty in its performance. Investigating this model revealed that global gain states differentially modulated sensory information encoding across the processing hierarchy, which explained their differential effects on performance on simple versus difficult tasks. These findings offer a novel hierarchical sensory processing account of how, and why, arousal state affects task performance.
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.