ArticleCognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience2022
Brain stimulation over dorsomedial prefrontal cortex modulates effort-based decision making.
Article in Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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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.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 37 citations in OpenAlex.
- Neurodevelopmental commonalities in cognitive control networks for mathematics and reading in meta-analysis of 3308 participants.Nature communications · 2025Pooled it
- Changing the motivation for mental work with temporal interference stimulation.Translational psychiatry · 2026Article
- Impaired midfrontal‑motor theta phase synchronization characterizes maladaptive motivational behavior in people with obsessive‑compulsive disorder.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Physical and cognitive contributions to fatigue perception: The interplay between local muscle fatigue and sensory prediction error.iScience · 2026Article
- Shared and distinct features of common effort-based decision-making paradigms and their relation to brain structure and neuropsychiatric conditions: An integrated narrative review.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Review
- Augmentation of frontoparietal gamma-band phase coupling enhances human altruistic behavior.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Neurometabolic predictors of mental effort in the frontal cortex.Translational psychiatry · 2025Article
- The neurocognitive mechanism underlying math avoidance among math anxious people.NPJ science of learning · 2025Article
- Brain stimulation over dorsomedial prefrontal cortex causally affects metacognitive bias but not mentalising.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2025Article
- Computational Phenotyping of Effort-Based Decision Making in Unmedicated Adults With Remitted Depression.Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging · 2025Article
- A neurometabolic mechanism involving dmPFC/dACC lactate in physical effort-based decision-making.Molecular psychiatry · 2025Article
- Serotonin and Effort-Based Decision-Making: Dissociating Behavioral Effects of 8-OH-DPAT and PCPA.Physiological research · 2024Article
- Causal functional maps of brain rhythms in working memory.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Research progress on the intervention of cognitive function using transcranial alternating current stimulation technology.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- No effects of the theta-frequency transcranial electrical stimulation for recall, attention control, and relation integration in working memory.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2024Article
- Debates on the dorsomedial prefrontal/dorsal anterior cingulate cortex: insights for future research.Brain : a journal of neurology · 2023Review
- Causal roles of prefrontal and temporo-parietal theta oscillations for inequity aversion.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2023Article
- Probing the Promises of Noninvasive Transcranial Electrical Stimulation for Boosting Mental Performance in Sports.Brain sciences · 2023Article
- Neurocognitive, physiological, and biophysical effects of transcranial alternating current stimulation.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2023Review
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
Deciding whether to engage in strenuous mental activities requires trading-off the potential benefits against the costs of mental effort, but it is unknown which brain rhythms are causally involved in such cost-benefit calculations. We show that brain stimulation targeting midfrontal theta oscillations increases the engagement in goal-directed mental effort. Participants received transcranial alternating current stimulation over dorsomedial prefrontal cortex while deciding whether they are willing to perform a demanding working memory task for monetary rewards. Midfrontal theta tACS increased the willingness to exert mental effort for rewards while leaving working memory performance unchanged. Computational modelling using a hierarchical Bayesian drift diffusion model suggests that theta tACS shifts the starting bias before evidence accumulation towards high reward-high effort options without affecting the velocity of the evidence accumulation process. Our findings suggest that the motivation to engage in goal-directed mental effort can be increased via midfrontal tACS.
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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.