The role of drug expectancy in the control of human drug seeking.
Human drug seeking may be goal directed in the sense that it is mediated by a mental representation of the drug or habitual in the sense that it is elicited by drug-paired cues directly. To test these 2 accounts, the authors assessed whether a drug-paired stimulus (S+) would transfer control to an independently trained drug-seeking response. Smokers were trained on an instrumental discrimination that established a tobacco S+ in Experiment 1 and a tobacco and a money S+ in Experiment 2 that elicited an expectancy of their respective outcomes. Participants then learned 2 new instrumental responses, 1 for each outcome, in the absence of these stimuli. Finally, in the transfer test, each S+ was found to augment performance of the new instrumental response that was trained with the same outcome. This outcome-specific transfer effect indicates that drug-paired stimuli controlled human drug seeking via a representation or expectation of the drug rather than through a direct stimulus-response association.
Hogarth
Lee
L
Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, School of Life Sciences, University of Sussex, England. lee.hogarth@nottingham.ac.uk
Dickinson
Anthony
A
Wright
Alexander
A
Kouvaraki
Mariangela
M
Duka
Theodora
T
D000328:Adult; D001245:Association Learning; D001288:Attention; D001364:Awareness; D003216:Conditioning, Operant; D003463:Cues; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009042:Motivation; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D011337:Probability Learning; D011930:Reaction Time; D012055:Reinforcement Schedule; D012691:Serial Learning; D012718:Set, Psychology; D012907:Smoking / Q000523:psychology*; D014163:Transfer, Psychology