ArticleNature communications2023
Dopamine regulates decision thresholds in human reinforcement learning in males.
Article in Nature communications, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 31 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
- A review on exploration-exploitation trade-off in psychiatric disorders.BMC psychiatry · 2025Pooled it
- Dopamine and Temporal Discounting: Revisiting Pharmacology and Individual Differences.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Trial
- Effects of antipsychotics on human cognitive function: causal evidence from healthy volunteers following sustained D2/D3 antagonism, D2/D3 partial agonism and placebo.Molecular psychiatry · 2025Trial
- The catecholamine precursor Tyrosine reduces autonomic arousal and decreases decision thresholds in reinforcement learning and temporal discounting.PLoS computational biology · 2022Trial
- Accumulation of virtual tokens towards a jackpot reward enhances performance and value encoding in dorsal anterior cingulate cortex.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Deciding for others diminishes model-based decision-making but depends on individual prosociality.NPJ science of learning · 2026Article
- Antidepressant drugs have pharmacological- and time-dependent effects on reinforcement learning in healthy volunteers: An 8 weeks randomized double-blind placebo-controlled study.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2026Article
- Apathy and Reduced Voluntary Activity in Older Adults with Parkinson's Disease: Mechanisms, Clinical Assessment, and Rehabilitation Implications.Clinical interventions in aging · 2026Review
- Transcutaneous Vagus Nerve Stimulation Enhances Probabilistic Learning.Psychophysiology · 2025Article
- Therapeutic effects of striatal dopaminergic modulation on idiopathic dystonia and OCD in humans: insights from the striosome hypothesis.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2025Article
- Complete Relief of Tardive Truncal Dystonia With a Low Dose of Levodopa/Carbidopa: A Case Report.Journal of movement disorders · 2025Article
- Longitudinal changes in reinforcement learning during smoking cessation: a computational analysis using a probabilistic reward task.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Decomposition of Reinforcement Learning Deficits in Disordered Gambling via Drift Diffusion Modeling and Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging.Computational psychiatry (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- Metabolomics profiling reveals low blood tyrosine levels as a metabolic feature of newborns from systemic lupus erythematosus pregnancies.Frontiers in immunology · 2024Article
- Dopamine Alters the Effect of Brain Stimulation on Decision-Making.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
8 authors at 5 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Dopamine fundamentally contributes to reinforcement learning, but recent accounts also suggest a contribution to specific action selection mechanisms and the regulation of response vigour. Here, we examine dopaminergic mechanisms underlying human reinforcement learning and action selection via a combined pharmacological neuroimaging approach in male human volunteers (n = 31, within-subjects; Placebo, 150 mg of the dopamine precursor L-dopa, 2 mg of the D2 receptor antagonist Haloperidol). We found little credible evidence for previously reported beneficial effects of L-dopa vs. Haloperidol on learning from gains and altered neural prediction error signals, which may be partly due to differences experimental design and/or drug dosages. Reinforcement learning drift diffusion models account for learning-related changes in accuracy and response times, and reveal consistent decision threshold reductions under both drugs, in line with the idea that lower dosages of D2 receptor antagonists increase striatal DA release via an autoreceptor-mediated feedback mechanism. These results are in line with the idea that dopamine regulates decision thresholds during reinforcement learning, and may help to bridge action selection and response vigor accounts of dopamine.
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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.