ArticleScientific reports2023
Excitatory stimulation of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex reduces cognitive gambling biases via improved feedback learning.
Article in Scientific reports, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
What it found
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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
6 citing papers in PubMed, 9 citations in OpenAlex.
- Article
- Noninvasive ventromedial prefrontal cortex stimulation can enhance and impair affective learning from rewarding and threatening stimuli.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2025Article
- The number of available sample observations modulates gambler's fallacy in betting behaviors.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Self-referencing versus other-referencing in gambling: effects of vmPFC stimulation on decision-making and feedback processing.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2025Article
- Neural underpinnings of ethical decisions in life and death dilemmas in naïve and expert firefighters.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Magnetoencephalographic correlates of pornography consumption: Associations with indicators of compulsive sexual behaviors.International journal of clinical and health psychology : IJCHPArticle
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
8 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Humans are subject to a variety of cognitive biases, such as the framing-effect or the gambler's fallacy, that lead to decisions unfitting of a purely rational agent. Previous studies have shown that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) plays a key role in making rational decisions and that stronger vmPFC activity is associated with attenuated cognitive biases. Accordingly, dysfunctions of the vmPFC are associated with impulsive decisions and pathological gambling. By applying a gambling paradigm in a between-subjects design with 33 healthy adults, we demonstrate that vmPFC excitation via transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) reduces the framing-effect and the gambler's fallacy compared to sham stimulation. Corresponding magnetoencephalographic data suggest improved inhibition of maladaptive options after excitatory vmPFC-tDCS. Our analyses suggest that the underlying mechanism might be improved reinforcement learning, as effects only emerge over time. These findings encourage further investigations of whether excitatory vmPFC-tDCS has clinical utility in treating pathological gambling or other behavioral addictions.
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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.