dc.contributor.author | Hardy, L | |
dc.contributor.author | Mitchell, C | |
dc.contributor.author | Seabrooke, T | |
dc.contributor.author | Hogarth, L | |
dc.date.accessioned | 2017-06-09T10:13:53Z | |
dc.date.issued | 2017-04-15 | |
dc.description.abstract | RATIONALE: Drug cue reactivity plays a crucial role in addiction, yet the underlying mechanisms are poorly understood. According to the binary associative account, drug stimuli retrieve an expectation of the drug outcome, which, in turn, elicits the associated drug-seeking response (S-O-R). By contrast, according to the hierarchical account, drug stimuli retrieve an expectation that the contingency between the drug-seeking response and the drug outcome is currently more effective, promoting performance of the drug-seeking response (S:R-O). METHODS: The current study discriminated between these two accounts using a biconditional Pavlovian-to-instrumental transfer (PIT) task with 128 alcohol drinkers. A biconditional discrimination was first trained in which two responses produced alcohol and food outcomes, respectively, and these response-outcome contingencies were reversed across two discriminative stimuli (SDs). In the PIT test, alcohol and food cues were compounded with the two SDs to examine their impact on percent alcohol choice in extinction. RESULTS: It was found that alcohol and food cues selectively primed choice of the response that earned that outcome in each SD (p < .001), and this effect was associated with participants' belief that cues signalled greater effectiveness of that response (p < .0001). CONCLUSIONS: The alcohol stimulus could not have selectively primed the alcohol-seeking response through binary S-O-R associations because the drug outcome was equally associated with both responses. Rather, the alcohol stimulus must have retrieved an expectation that the response-alcohol contingency available in the current context was more likely to be effective (S:R-O), which primed performance of the alcohol-seeking response. | en_GB |
dc.description.sponsorship | The work was supported by an ESRC PhD scholarship to Lorna Hardy. | en_GB |
dc.identifier.citation | Published online 15 April 2017 | en_GB |
dc.identifier.doi | 10.1007/s00213-017-4605-x | |
dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/10871/27905 | |
dc.language.iso | en | en_GB |
dc.publisher | Springer Verlag | en_GB |
dc.relation.url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28412771 | en_GB |
dc.rights | © The Author(s) 2017. Open Access. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. | en_GB |
dc.subject | Alcohol problems | en_GB |
dc.subject | Binary associations | en_GB |
dc.subject | Cue reactivity | en_GB |
dc.subject | Hierarchical learning | en_GB |
dc.title | Drug cue reactivity involves hierarchical instrumental learning: evidence from a biconditional Pavlovian to instrumental transfer task | en_GB |
dc.type | Article | en_GB |
dc.date.available | 2017-06-09T10:13:53Z | |
exeter.place-of-publication | Germany | en_GB |
dc.description | This is the final version of the article. Available from Springer Verlag via the DOI in this record. | en_GB |
dc.identifier.journal | Psychopharmacology | en_GB |