ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2024
A disinhibitory circuit mechanism explains a general principle of peak performance during mid-level arousal.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 33 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
33 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Acute effects of physical activity breaking up sedentary behavior on cognitive function, biological mechanisms, and practical recommendations: a systematic review.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Pooled it
- Evidence for domain-general arousal from semantic and neuroimaging meta-analyses reconciles opposing views on arousal.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Pooled it
- Acute effects of two different combined exercise modalities on executive function and circulating neurotrophic factors in young healthy adults.European journal of applied physiology · 2026Trial
- Transcranial direct current stimulation of the occipitotemporal cortex enhances identification of ambiguous faces.Scientific reports · 2025Trial
- Neural and autonomic predictors of future listening errors.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Anticipatory attentional avoidance in learned threat associations.Psychological research · 2026Article
- Aberrant prefrontal activity and arousal level correlate with action initiation and response vigor in rats.iScience · 2026Article
- Arousal shapes motivation: an integrative framework for understanding motivational deficits.Translational psychiatry · 2026Review
- Pupil-linked arousal heterogeneously modulates cell-type-specific sensory processing.Science advances · 2026Article
- Phasic and tonic arousal distinctly shape human decision bias.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Confidence in naturalistic decision making.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2026Article
- Differential effects of external noise and situational interest on neurophysiological responses during video based learning.NPJ science of learning · 2025Article
- Stronger reliance on visual perceptual history in individuals with higher math anxiety.BMC biology · 2025Article
- What you listen to makes a difference: The impact of music on attention and well-being.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2025Article
- Curiosity and surprise differentially affect memory depending on age.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Cortical networks with multiple interneuron types generate oscillatory patterns during predictive coding.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Adaptive arousal regulation: Pharmacologically shifting the peak of the Yerkes-Dodson curve by catecholaminergic enhancement of arousal.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Article
- Neuromodulatory influences on propagation of traveling waves along the unimodal-transmodal gradient.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2025Article
- State modulation in spatial networks with three interneuron subtypes.Science advances · 2025Article
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6 authors.
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Abstract
Perceptual decision-making is highly dependent on the momentary arousal state of the brain, which fluctuates over time on a scale of hours, minutes, and even seconds. The textbook relationship between momentary arousal and task performance is captured by an inverted U-shape, as put forward in the Yerkes-Dodson law. This law suggests optimal performance at moderate levels of arousal and impaired performance at low or high arousal levels. However, despite its popularity, the evidence for this relationship in humans is mixed at best. Here, we use pupil-indexed arousal and performance data from various perceptual decision-making tasks to provide converging evidence for the inverted U-shaped relationship between spontaneous arousal fluctuations and performance across different decision types (discrimination, detection) and sensory modalities (visual, auditory). To further understand this relationship, we built a neurobiologically plausible mechanistic model and show that it is possible to reproduce our findings by incorporating two types of interneurons that are both modulated by an arousal signal. The model architecture produces two dynamical regimes under the influence of arousal: one regime in which performance increases with arousal and another regime in which performance decreases with arousal, together forming an inverted U-shaped arousal-performance relationship. We conclude that the inverted U-shaped arousal-performance relationship is a general and robust property of sensory processing. It might be brought about by the influence of arousal on two types of interneurons that together act as a disinhibitory pathway for the neural populations that encode the available sensory evidence used for the decision.
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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.