title: Detection versus sustained attention to drug cues have dissociable roles in mediating drug seeking behavior.
abstract: It is commonly thought that attentional bias for drug cues plays an important role in motivating human drug-seeking behavior. To assess this claim, two groups of smokers were trained in a discrimination task in which a tobacco-seeking response was rewarded only in the presence of 1 particular stimulus (the S+). The key manipulation was that whereas 1 group could control the duration of S+ presentation, for the second group, this duration was fixed. The results showed that the fixed-duration group acquired a sustained attentional bias to the S+ over training, indexed by greater dwell time and fixation count, which emerged in parallel with the control exerted by the S+ over tobacco-seeking behavior. By contrast, the controllable-duration group acquired no sustained attentional bias for S+ and instead used efficient detection of the S+ to achieve a comparable level of control over tobacco seeking. These data suggest that detection and sustained attention to drug cues have dissociable roles in enabling drug cues to motivate drug-seeking behavior, which has implications for attentional retraining as a treatment for addiction.
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham, England. lee.hogarth@nottingham.ac.uk
authors.forename: Lee
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Hogarth
authors.forename: Anthony
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Dickinson
authors.forename: Theodora
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Duka
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention / Q000187:drug effects*; D003213:Conditioning, Psychological / Q000187:drug effects; D003463:Cues; D006801:Humans; D009042:Motivation; D012201:Reward; D019966:Substance-Related Disorders / Q000209:etiology* / Q000523:psychology / Q000628:therapy