Trial reportNeuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology2023
Disentangling the roles of dopamine and noradrenaline in the exploration-exploitation tradeoff during human decision-making.
Trial report in Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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
16 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 38 citations in OpenAlex.
- Differential Associations of Dopamine and Serotonin With Reward and Punishment Processes in Humans: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.JAMA psychiatry · 2025Pooled it
- Competing value signals impair reward-learning via dopaminergic mechanisms and increase exploration.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Cortical Microstructural Variations Correlate With Individual Differences in Gamified Exploration-Exploitation Behaviours.Computational psychiatry (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2026Article
- Catecholamines reduce choice history biases in perceptual decision making.PLoS biology · 2025Article
- Impaired reward sensitivity in Parkinson's depression is unresponsive to dopamine treatment.Brain : a journal of neurology · 2025Article
- Playful brains: a possible neurobiological pathway to cognitive health in aging.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2025Article
- Computational Mechanisms of Information-Seeking in Anxiety.Current topics in behavioral neurosciences · 2025Review
- Decrease in decision noise from adolescence into adulthood mediates an increase in more sophisticated choice behaviors and performance gain.PLoS biology · 2024Article
- Dopamine and Norepinephrine Differentially Mediate the Exploration-Exploitation Tradeoff.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Article
- Reviewing explore/exploit decision-making as a transdiagnostic target for psychosis, depression, and anxiety.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2024Review
- Exploration-Exploitation Mechanisms in Recurrent Neural Networks and Human Learners in Restless Bandit Problems.Computational brain & behavior · 2024Article
- Event boundaries drive norepinephrine release and distinctive neural representations of space in the rodent hippocampus.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Temporal Patterns of Angular Displacement of Endosomes: Insights into Motor Protein Exchange Dynamics.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2024Article
- Adaptive Responding to Stimulus-Outcome Associations Requires Noradrenergic Transmission in the Medial Prefrontal Cortex.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Article
- The explore/exploit trade-off: An ecologically valid and translational framework that can advance mechanistic understanding of eating disorders.The International journal of eating disorders · 2024Article
- Validating molecular target-enriched fMRI for disentangling drug effects on dopamine.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.)Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Balancing the exploration of new options and the exploitation of known options is a fundamental challenge in decision-making, yet the mechanisms involved in this balance are not fully understood. Here, we aimed to elucidate the distinct roles of dopamine and noradrenaline in the exploration-exploitation tradeoff during human choice. To this end, we used a double-blind, placebo-controlled design in which participants received either a placebo, 400 mg of the D2/D3 receptor antagonist amisulpride, or 40 mg of the β-adrenergic receptor antagonist propranolol before they completed a virtual patch-foraging task probing exploration and exploitation. We systematically varied the rewards associated with choice options, the rate by which rewards decreased over time, and the opportunity costs it took to switch to the next option to disentangle the contributions of dopamine and noradrenaline to specific choice aspects. Our data show that amisulpride increased the sensitivity to all of these three critical choice features, whereas propranolol was associated with a reduced tendency to use value information. Our findings provide novel insights into the specific roles of dopamine and noradrenaline in the regulation of human choice behavior, suggesting a critical involvement of dopamine in directed exploration and a role of noradrenaline in more random exploration.
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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.