Behavioral and Neural Arguments of Motivational Influence on Decision Making During Uncertainty
The scientific world is increasingly interested in motivation, primarily due to the suspected impact on decision-making abilities, particularly in uncertain conditions. To explore this plausible relationship, 28 healthy participants were included in the study and performed decision-making and motivational tasks while their neural activity was recorded. All participants performed the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) and were split into two groups based on their score, one favorable group with 14 participants who performed advantageously and one undecided group with 14 participants who failed to develop the correct strategy on the IGT. In addition, all participants performed the Effort Expenditure fo…
Can transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) improve impulsivity in healthy and psychiatric adult populations? A systematic review.
Impulsivity is a multidimensional phenomenon that remains hard to define. It compounds the core pathological construct of many neuropsychiatric illnesses, and despite its close relation to suicide risk, it currently has no specific treatment. Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is a non-invasive brain stimulation technique whose application results in cognitive function improvement, both in healthy and psychiatric populations. Following PRISMA recommendations, a systematic review of the literature concerning tDCS's effects on impulsive behaviour was performed using the PubMed database. The research was based on the combination of the keyword 'tDCS' with 'impulsivity', 'response i…
Behavioral and Electrophysiological Arguments in Favor of a Relationship between Impulsivity, Risk-Taking, and Success on the Iowa Gambling Task
The aim of the present study was to investigate the relationship between trait impulsivity, risk-taking, and decision-making performance. We recruited 20 healthy participants who performed the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) and the Balloon Analog Risk Task (BART) to measure decision-making and risk-taking. The impulsivity was measured by the Barratt Impulsiveness Scale. Resting-state neural activity was recorded to explore whether brain oscillatory rhythms provide important information about the dispositional trait of impulsivity. We found a significant correlation between the ability to develop a successful strategy and the propensity to take more risks in the first trials of the BART. Risk-taki…
Effects of High Frequency Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (HF-rTMS) on Delay Discounting in Major Depressive Disorder: An Open-Label Uncontrolled Pilot Study
Background: Delay discounting (DD) refers to the decrease of a present subjective value of a future reward as the delay of its delivery increases. Major depressive disorder (MDD), besides core emotional and physical symptoms, involves difficulties in reward processing. Depressed patients often display greater temporal discounting rates than healthy subjects. Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) is a non-invasive brain stimulation technique applied in several countries to adult patients with treatment resistant depression. Studies suggest that this technique can be used to modulate DD, but no trial has assessed its effects on depressed patients. Methods: In this open-label unc…
Event-Related Potentials (ERP) Indices of Motivation during the Effort Expenditure for Reward Task
Dynamic and temporal facets of the various constructs that comprise motivation remain to be explored. Here, we adapted the Effort Expenditure for Reward Task, a well-known laboratory task used to evaluate motivation, to study the event-related potentials associated with reward processing. The Stimulus Preceding Negativity (SPN) and the P300 were utilized as motivation indicators with high density electroencephalography. The SPN was found to be more negative for difficult choices compared to easy choices, suggesting a greater level of motivation, at a neurophysiological level. The insula, a structure previously associated with both effort discounting and prediction error, was concomitantly a…