title: Addiction History Associates with the Propensity to Form Habits.
abstract: Learned habitual responses to environmental stimuli allow efficient interaction with the environment, freeing cognitive resources for more demanding tasks. However, when the outcome of such actions is no longer a desired goal, established stimulus-response (S-R) associations or habits must be overcome. Among people with substance use disorders (SUDs), difficulty in overcoming habitual responses to stimuli associated with their addiction in favor of new, goal-directed behaviors contributes to relapse. Animal models of habit learning demonstrate that chronic self-administration of drugs of abuse promotes habitual responding beyond the domain of compulsive drug seeking. However, whether a similar propensity toward domain-general habitual responding occurs in humans with SUDs has remained unclear. To address this question, we used a visuomotor S-R learning and relearning task, the Hidden Association between Images Task, which employs abstract visual stimuli and manual responses. This task allows us to measure new S-R association learning and well-learned S-R association execution and includes a response contingency change manipulation to quantify the degree to which responding is habit-based, rather than goal-directed. We find that people with SUDs learn new S-R associations as well as healthy control participants do. Moreover, people with an SUD history slightly outperform controls in S-R execution. In contrast, people with SUDs are specifically impaired in overcoming well-learned S-R associations; those with SUDs make a significantly greater proportion of perseverative errors during well-learned S-R replacement, indicating the more habitual nature of their responses. Thus, with equivalent training and practice, people with SUDs appear to show enhanced domain-general habit formation.
authors.affiliation: University of North Carolina.
authors.forename: Theresa H
authors.initials: TH
authors.lastname: McKim
authors.affiliation: University of North Carolina.
authors.forename: Daniel J
authors.initials: DJ
authors.lastname: Bauer
authors.affiliation: University of North Carolina.
authors.forename: Charlotte A
authors.initials: CA
authors.lastname: Boettiger
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001245:Association Learning; D016739:Behavior, Addictive; D005260:Female; D006184:Habits; D006801:Humans; D016014:Linear Models; D008297:Male; D011214:Practice, Psychological; D011581:Psychological Tests; D011594:Psychometrics; D019966:Substance-Related Disorders / Q000523:psychology*; D055815:Young Adult