AT-RISK ALCOHOL USERS SHOW DECREASED SENSITIVITY TO PUNISHMENT SEVERITY IN LEARNING FROM ERRORS
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1
University of Melbourne, Psychological Sciences, Australia
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2
University of Queensland, Queensland Brain Institute, Australia
In non-addicted participants, punishing an error improves learning, with performance improving as a function of the magnitude of negative feedback. Drug addiction, however, has been associated with a diminished capacity to learn from punishment and adapt behaviour. Given the role of punishment in individual and societal level behavioural interventions for addiction, it is important to understand the insensitivity to punishment. While numerous studies have reported higher levels of reward impulsivity in heavy drinkers compared to light drinkers, including under conditions of high risk for punishment, research to date has not examined if the insensitivity to punishment in social drinkers is associated with their poorer learning from negative feedback. The current study administered a novel associative learning task that provided monetary reward and punishment for recall performance to 122 healthy participants (94 females; mean age, 22.10 years) with low (27 females, 7 males (27.9% of the total sample); mean age, 22.47 years), hazardous (26 females, 24 males (41% of the total sample); mean age, 21.45 years) and harmful (16 females, 22 males (31.1% of the total sample); mean age, 21.05 years) levels of alcohol use (classified in accordance with the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT) risk grouping; low risk score = 0-7, hazardous risk score = 8 -15, harmful risk score = 16+). The overall mean AUDIT score for the current sample was 12.61 (SD= 7.30; range= 1-29). The majority of participants, at 57.4%, reported drinking 2-3 times per week, with 50.0% of the sample admitting to regular binge drinking (i.e., drinking in excess of 6 drinks during a single session on a weekly basis). Performance on the task indicated that non-dependent, but hazardous and harmful-risk drinkers were less sensitive to the magnitude of punishment than low-risk drinkers, having significantly poorer learning from punished errors. This finding has implications for prevention and rehabilitation approaches for alcohol addiction, and further suggests that deficits in learning from punishment may be a precipitating factor in the development of alcohol addiction.
Keywords:
addiction research,
alcohol use,
learning from errors,
Punishment sensitivity,
alcohol dependency
Conference:
ACNS-2012 Australasian Cognitive Neuroscience Conference, Brisbane, Australia, 29 Nov - 2 Dec, 2012.
Presentation Type:
Poster Presentation
Topic:
Executive Processes
Citation:
Moore
JL,
Rossiter
S,
Beadle
E and
Hester
R
(2012). AT-RISK ALCOHOL USERS SHOW DECREASED SENSITIVITY TO PUNISHMENT SEVERITY IN LEARNING FROM ERRORS.
Conference Abstract:
ACNS-2012 Australasian Cognitive Neuroscience Conference.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2012.208.00193
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Received:
24 Oct 2012;
Published Online:
17 Nov 2012.
*
Correspondence:
Dr. Jennifer L Moore, University of Melbourne, Psychological Sciences, Melbourne, Melbourne, 3010, Australia, moorejlmc@gmail.com