Department of Biological Psychology, Institute for Experimental Psychology, Heinrich Heine University, Düsseldorf, Germany.
Methods and Evaluation, International Psychoanalytic University Berlin, Berlin, Germany.
Psychopharmacology (Berl). 2019 Sep;236(9):2747-2759. doi: 10.1007/s00213-019-05250-y. Epub 2019 Apr 29.
Modafinil is increasingly used by healthy humans as a neuroenhancer in order to improve cognitive functioning. Research on the effects of modafinil on cognition yielded most consistent findings for complex tasks relying on the prefrontal cortex (PFC).
The present randomized placebo-controlled double-blind crossover study aimed to investigate the effect of a single dose of modafinil (200 mg) on everyday moral decision making and its neural correlates, which have been linked to the ventro- and dorsomedial PFC.
Healthy male study participants were presented with short stories describing everyday moral or neutral dilemmas. Each moral dilemma required a decision between a personal desire and a moral standard, while the neutral dilemmas required decisions between two personal desires. The participants underwent this task twice, once under the influence of modafinil and once under placebo. Brain activity associated with the processing of the dilemmas was assessed by means of functional magnetic resonance imaging.
For the processing of moral vs. neutral dilemmas, activations were found in a network of brain regions linked to social cognitive processes including, among others, the bilateral medial PFC, the insula, and the precuneus. Modafinil was found to increase the number of moral decisions and had no effect on brain activity associated with dilemma processing. Exploratory analyses revealed reduced response-locked activity in the dorsomedial PFC for moral compared to neutral dilemmas under modafinil, but not under placebo.
The results are discussed in terms of altered predictions of others' emotional states under modafinil, possibly due to higher processing efficiency.
莫达非尼作为一种神经增强剂，越来越多地被健康人群用于提高认知功能。关于莫达非尼对认知影响的研究发现，最一致的结果是在依赖前额叶皮层（PFC）的复杂任务上。
本随机、安慰剂对照、双盲交叉研究旨在调查单剂量莫达非尼（200mg）对日常道德决策及其与腹侧和背侧前额叶相关的神经相关性的影响。
健康男性研究参与者阅读描述日常道德或中性困境的短篇故事。每个道德困境都需要在个人欲望和道德标准之间做出选择，而中性困境则需要在两个个人欲望之间做出选择。参与者两次完成此任务，一次在莫达非尼的影响下，一次在安慰剂下。通过功能磁共振成像评估处理困境时的大脑活动。
对于道德与中性困境的处理，在与社会认知过程相关的大脑区域网络中发现了激活，包括双侧内侧前额叶皮层、脑岛和楔前叶等。莫达非尼被发现增加了道德决策的数量，并且对与困境处理相关的大脑活动没有影响。探索性分析显示，在莫达非尼下，与中性困境相比，道德困境下背侧前额叶的反应锁定活动减少，但在安慰剂下则没有。
根据莫达非尼下对他人情绪状态的预测改变，结果被讨论，这可能是由于处理效率更高。
