ArticleScience advances2023
Not so smart? "Smart" drugs increase the level but decrease the quality of cognitive effort.
Article in Science advances, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 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
13 citing papers in PubMed.
- Methamphetamine-induced adaptation of learning rate dynamics depend on baseline performance.eLife · 2025Trial
- Reducing cognitive demand fails to mitigate choice overload: Multimodal neural and gaze evidence for effort conservation.iScience · 2026Article
- [Performance-related substance use in everyday life and work].Bundesgesundheitsblatt, Gesundheitsforschung, Gesundheitsschutz · 2026Review
- Beyond attention: methylphenidate reduces dishonesty in healthy adults.Psychopharmacology · 2026Article
- ADHD treatments move beyond stimulants.Nature · 2026Article
- Article
- Acute stress impairs decision-making at varying levels of decision complexity.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Striatal dopamine can enhance both fast working memory, and slow reinforcement learning, while reducing implicit effort cost sensitivity.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Acute anxiogenic effect of lisdexamphetamine dimesylate in zebrafish: implications of off-label cognitive enhancement use.Toxicology research · 2025Article
- Seasonal trends in methylphenidate use: A mirror of misuse or compliance?The South African journal of psychiatry : SAJP : the journal of the Society of Psychiatrists of South Africa · 2025Article
- Ginkgo Biloba as a niche theme cognitive enhancer agent, 1420 dokumen of Scopus database. A bibliometric study from 1988 to 2024.F1000Research · 2025Article
- An Integrated Perspective of Effort and Perception of Effort.Sports medicine (Auckland, N.Z.) · 2024Review
- Categorical and dimensional aspects of stimulant medication effects in adult patients with ADHD and healthy controls.Frontiers in pharmacology · 2024Article
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
The efficacy of pharmaceutical cognitive enhancers in everyday complex tasks remains to be established. Using the knapsack optimization problem as a stylized representation of difficulty in tasks encountered in daily life, we discover that methylphenidate, dextroamphetamine, and modafinil cause knapsack value attained in the task to diminish significantly compared to placebo, even if the chance of finding the optimal solution (~50%) is not reduced significantly. Effort (decision time and number of steps taken to find a solution) increases significantly, but productivity (quality of effort) decreases significantly. At the same time, productivity differences across participants decrease, even reverse, to the extent that above-average performers end up below average and vice versa. The latter can be attributed to increased randomness of solution strategies. Our findings suggest that "smart drugs" increase motivation, but a reduction in quality of effort, crucial to solve complex problems, annuls this effect.
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.