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Detection versus sustained attention to drug cues have dissociable roles in mediating drug seeking behavior.

journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-07, 18:18 authored by Lee Hogarth, Anthony Dickinson, Dora Duka
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.

History

Publication status

  • Published

Journal

Experimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology

ISSN

1064-1297

Issue

1

Volume

17

Page range

21-30

Pages

10.0

Department affiliated with

  • Psychology Publications

Full text available

  • No

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2012-02-06

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