Trial reportCurrent biology : CB2021
The Computational, Pharmacological, and Physiological Determinants of Sensory Learning under Uncertainty.
Trial report in Current biology : CB, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 34 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
34 citing papers in PubMed, 96 citations in OpenAlex.
- Pharmacological and pupillary evidence for the noradrenergic contribution to reinforcement learning in Parkinson's disease.Communications biology · 2025Trial
- Disentangling the roles of dopamine and noradrenaline in the exploration-exploitation tradeoff during human decision-making.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2023Trial
- Noradrenergic deficits contribute to apathy in Parkinson's disease through the precision of expected outcomes.PLoS computational biology · 2022Trial
- Computational mechanisms of learning and forgetting differentiate affective and substance use disorders.Molecular psychiatry · 2026Article
- Predicting emotional valence in autism: a preregistered study in the Bayesian Brain framework.Molecular autism · 2026Article
- Orbitofrontal noradrenaline supports adaptive learning-rate adjustment in probabilistic reversal learning.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Article
- Arousal shapes motivation: an integrative framework for understanding motivational deficits.Translational psychiatry · 2026Review
- Prediction-based attention computing: a proof of concept study.Virtual reality · 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
- Active information sampling in health and disease.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2025Review
- Uncertainty estimation with prediction-error circuits.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Counteracting uncertainty: exploring the impact of anxiety on updating predictions about environmental states.Biological cybernetics · 2025Article
- Bayesian Workflow for Generative Modeling in Computational Psychiatry.Computational psychiatry (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Computational Mechanisms of Information-Seeking in Anxiety.Current topics in behavioral neurosciences · 2025Review
- The Many Roles of Precision in Action.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- Confidence and second-order errors in cortical circuits.PNAS nexus · 2024Article
- Pharmacological Elevation of Catecholamine Levels Improves Perceptual Decisions, But Not Metacognitive Insight.eNeuro · 2024Article
- The Relationship Between Environmental Statistics and Predictive Gaze Behaviour During a Manual Interception Task: Eye Movements as Active Inference.Computational brain & behavior · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
The ability to represent and respond to uncertainty is fundamental to human cognition and decision-making. Noradrenaline (NA) is hypothesized to play a key role in coordinating the sensory, learning, and physiological states necessary to adapt to a changing world, but direct evidence for this is lacking in humans. Here, we tested the effects of attenuating noradrenergic neurotransmission on learning under uncertainty. We probed the effects of the β-adrenergic receptor antagonist propranolol (40 mg) using a between-subjects, double-blind, placebo-controlled design. Participants performed a probabilistic associative learning task, and we employed a hierarchical learning model to formally quantify prediction errors about cue-outcome contingencies and changes in these associations over time (volatility). Both unexpectedness and noise slowed down reaction times, but propranolol augmented the interaction between these main effects such that behavior was influenced more by prior expectations when uncertainty was high. Computationally, this was driven by a reduction in learning rates, with people slower to update their beliefs in the face of new information. Attenuating the global effects of NA also eliminated the phasic effects of prediction error and volatility on pupil size, consistent with slower belief updating. Finally, estimates of environmental volatility were predicted by baseline cardiac measures in all participants. Our results demonstrate that NA underpins behavioral and computational responses to uncertainty. These findings have important implications for understanding the impact of uncertainty on human biology and cognition.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What Socratic 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 Socratic graph.