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Open research questions in Neural and Behavioral Psychology Studies

1,042 gap statements mined from Neural and Behavioral Psychology Studies papers in our 7.9M-paper local library, which holds 5,235 papers on the topic — drawn mostly from each paper's own stated research gap, future-work, challenge and limitation notes, and its abstract. The ones listed below are a selection still marked open; each names the study that raised it, with a DOI link where the paper has one.

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What the literature leaves open

  • The study had to account for the variability in disengagement effects across different feature dimensions. The study needed to balance the trade-off between detecting a 31-ms delay with 80% power and the required number of participants.

    Color as a gate to verification: Super-additive costs in oculomotor disengagement · 2026 · DOI

  • The need for developmentally sensitive adversity assessments. The lack of longitudinal and treatment-aware designs in prior research. The need for multimodal physiological validation and cross-cohort replication.

    Developmental timing matters: enhancing longitudinal and mechanistic research on neurovascular coupling in maltreatment-related depression · 2026 · DOI

  • Prior work points to a global reduction in prefrontal functioning in obesity, but the present study suggests that obesity may be associated with differences in how prefrontal resources are distributed across hemispheres and regions. The study identifies a gap in understanding the broader organization of executive control during verbal generation in obesity.

    Prefrontal oxygenation during verbal fluency in severe obesity · 2026 · DOI

  • The 'common currency' view of decision-making has faced intense scrutiny regarding its psychological realism. There is a need to refine this model and provide a more nuanced understanding of decision-making. The paper identifies a gap in the understanding of the biological breakdowns in brain communication and valuation that underlie pathological decision-making.

    Editorial: Decision making and its pathologies: a translational animal-to-human overview · 2026 · DOI

  • The difficulty of developing effective treatments for food addiction due to limited understanding of neural circuit and electrophysiological mechanisms. The challenge of using EEG and event-related potentials to examine brain activity in response to food cues and non-food tasks.

    Attention Affecting Response Inhibition in Overweight Adults with Food Addiction · 2025 · DOI

  • The lack of knowledge on the neural circuit and electrophysiological mechanisms of food addiction. The limited understanding of the relationship between attention and response inhibition in food addiction. The need for novel mechanistic insights into food addiction to develop effective treatments.

    Attention Affecting Response Inhibition in Overweight Adults with Food Addiction · 2025 · DOI

  • There is a lack of comprehensive studies on the development of attention networks across the human lifespan. Prior studies have focused on specific aspects of attention, but a comprehensive understanding of attention development is needed.

    Changes in the Networks of Attention across the Lifespan: A Graphical Meta-Analysis · 2024 · DOI

  • The neurocognitive features associated with the reactivity effect of making JOLs on memory are not well understood. Prior studies have not explored the neural mechanisms underlying the reactivity effect. The current study aims to fill this gap by using EEG to record brain activity during a word list learning task.

    Judgments of Learning Reactively Improve Memory by Enhancing Learning Engagement and Inducing Elaborative Processing: Evidence from an EEG Study · 2024 · DOI

  • However, little is known about how sequential effects and attentional capture are jointly modulated by learned distractor value.

    Distraction driven by reward history: Attentional capture and sequential effects · 2026 · DOI

  • However, their neural dynamics remain debated, mainly due to the limited temporal resolution of fMRI and to EEG designs that fail to disentangle different forms of stability.

    Waves of control: An ER(S)P study to explore the neural dynamics of proactive and reactive stability · 2026 · DOI

  • Age-related differences in affect are well established, but their neural mechanisms remain unclear.

    Amygdala Persistence in Aging: Replication and Extension of Puccetti et al. (2021) · 2026 · DOI

  • Whether space, time, and numerosity rely on a common magnitude system remains debated.

    Representational continuity through cognitive reconfiguration of magnitude networks in the human brain · 2026 · DOI

  • However, the breadth of this flexibility and its underlying mechanisms remain unclear.

    Learning to Pursue Goals that Conflict with Prior Experience Relies on Fast Revaluation and Slow Value Updating · 2026 · DOI

  • Previous studies have obtained mixed findings, in part because the typical free-response-time paradigm lacks the specificity required to disentangle component processes underlying inhibitory control.

    Does Global Slowing Explain Age Effects in Inhibitory Control? · 2026 · DOI

  • Alertness plays a critical role in sensory processing, yet the extent to which phasic (transient) and tonic (sustained) alertness interact in shaping attention and cognitive control of attention (top-down control) remains unclear.

    Beyond mixed alerting signals: Disentangling phasic from tonic influences on visual attention and cognitive control. · 2026 · DOI

  • Adjustments in self-paced preparation improve performance and have been linked to metacognition, but these relationships have not been explored for post-error adjustments.

    Post-error slowing and individual differences in metacognition. · 2026 · DOI

  • The motivational hypothesis posits that benefits may be elusive because people are insufficiently motivated to engage effortful control in response to precues signaling an incongruent trial.

    In search of precue benefits: Are people unmotivated to heighten control on demand? · 2026 · DOI

  • However, their persistence following remission remains unclear, hindering the differentiation between state versus trait characteristics.

    Anhedonia and Reward Learning in Major Depression: State or Trait? · 2026 · DOI

  • Explore the neurocognitive underpinnings associated with the effect in different populations. Investigate the effects of JOLs on other types of memory tasks. Examine the relationship between JOLs and other metacognitive judgments.

    Judgments of Learning Reactively Improve Memory by Enhancing Learning Engagement and Inducing Elaborative Processing: Evidence from an EEG Study · 2024 · DOI

  • The study did not include monetary rewards to prevent the addition of a complex confounding effect to the data, - The study had a limited age range of 7-21 years, - The study excluded participants with a history of diagnosed neurological or psychiatric disorders, - The study had a limited sample size of 148…

    The Cortical Source of the P300 ERP Generator in the Associative Learning Task: A Consensus of Four Inversion Algorithms · 2026 · DOI

  • Investigating the neural mechanisms of rule acquisition in different age groups, - Examining the effects of monetary rewards on the associative learning process, - Comparing the results of different source reconstruction algorithms, - Investigating the relationship between the P300 time window and other cognitive…

    The Cortical Source of the P300 ERP Generator in the Associative Learning Task: A Consensus of Four Inversion Algorithms · 2026 · DOI

  • Investigate the neural mechanisms underlying hierarchical gating into verification, - Examine the effects of distractor-target similarity on oculomotor disengagement in other types of visual search tasks, - Explore the application of the findings to real-world search…

    Color as a gate to verification: Super-additive costs in oculomotor disengagement · 2026 · DOI

  • The study had a partially informed design due to the inherent challenges in achieving effective blinding in completely balanced alcohol administration studies - The study excluded individuals who were fully abstinent from alcohol - The study had a limited sample size of 118 young adult…

    The effects of reward uncertainty and alcohol intoxication on human sign- and goal-tracking · 2026 · DOI

  • Investigating the relationship between individual differences in sign-tracking tendency and attentional allocation to the sign cue during the reward omission phase - Examining the effects of Group (Alcohol vs. Placebo), Probability…

    The effects of reward uncertainty and alcohol intoxication on human sign- and goal-tracking · 2026 · DOI

  • Developing targeted, circuit-based therapies to help patients regain control over…

    Editorial: Decision making and its pathologies: a translational animal-to-human overview · 2026 · DOI

Most-cited papers in Neural and Behavioral Psychology Studies

Most recent work

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This page shows what the Neural and Behavioral Psychology Studies literature already flags as unresolved. To narrow it to your specific question, search the Research Gap Finder: the search is free with a free account and lists the papers closest to your topic first. Unlocking that topic (50 credits, charged once) fills the comparison table from our 7.9M-paper local library and writes the gaps from its rows.

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Open questions raised by papers listed on this page include: (1) The lack of longitudinal and treatment-aware designs in prior research (“Developmental timing matters: enhancing longitudinal and mechanistic research…”, 2026); (2) Little is known about how sequential effects and attentional capture are jointly modulated by learned distractor value (“Distraction driven by reward history: Attentional capture and sequential effects”, 2026); (3) Age-related differences in affect are well established, but their neural mechanisms remain unclear (“Amygdala Persistence in Aging: Replication and Extension of Puccetti et al.”, 2026); (4) The breadth of this flexibility and its underlying mechanisms remain unclear (“Learning to Pursue Goals that Conflict with Prior Experience Relies on Fast…”, 2026); (5) Alertness plays a critical role in sensory processing, yet the extent to which phasic (transient) and tonic (sustained) alertness interact in shaping attention and cognitive control of attention (top-down control) remains unclear (“Beyond mixed alerting signals: Disentangling phasic from tonic influences on…”, 2026). 1,042 gap statements have been mined from Neural and Behavioral Psychology Studies papers in our 7.9M-paper local library, which holds 5,235 papers on the topic; the gaps come from whichever of those papers state one. They are mostly the research gaps the authors state and the papers' abstracts, plus future-work, limitations and challenges passages. The ones listed below are a selection still marked open; each names the study that raised it, with a DOI link where the paper has one, so you can read the original claim in context.

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