Journal: Nature Communications
Article Title: Vagus nerve stimulation boosts the drive to work for rewards
doi: 10.1038/s41467-020-17344-9
Figure Lengend Snippet: a Overall, participants are slower to invigorate behavior if they want the reward at stake less as depicted in the 2d-density polygon (brighter colors indicate higher density of data). In line with univariate analyses, robust regression lines show that the slope reflecting the association between invigoration and wanting is decreased by transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation (taVNS: red line; sham is depicted as blue line). Again, no change was observed for monetary rewards after taVNS on the left side. b Compared to permuted data, taVNS induces significant changes in the association between invigoration and wanting. By fitting robust regression coefficients, b , after permuting the labels for taVNS vs. sham stimulation, we compared the observed difference in slopes for taVNS—sham (in red) to a null distribution (violin plot in gray). This two-sided permutation test showed a significant main effect across both stimulation sides (l + r = left + right) and for taVNS on the right, but not the left side. On the left side, we observed an interaction with reward type instead, p = 0.029. VAS = visual analog scale. p -values are unadjusted for multiple comparisons. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.
Article Snippet: To test for significance, we permuted the vector encoding the stimulation condition and repeated the robust regression fitting procedure 10,000 times (MATLAB robustfit, weight function huber).
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