Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Article (37)
- Postprint (10)
- Other (7)
- Conference Proceeding (2)
- Review (2)
- Doctoral Thesis (1)
- Preprint (1)
Is part of the Bibliography
- yes (60) (remove)
Keywords
- Alcohol dependence (6)
- Pavlovian-to-instrumental transfer (6)
- fMRI (6)
- alcohol (5)
- ventral striatum (5)
- Reinforcement learning (4)
- Working memory (3)
- depression (3)
- interference control (3)
- monetary incentive delay task (3)
Institute
- Department Sport- und Gesundheitswissenschaften (28)
- Department Psychologie (15)
- Strukturbereich Kognitionswissenschaften (9)
- Extern (1)
- Fakultät für Gesundheitswissenschaften (1)
- Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät (1)
- Institut für Mathematik (1)
- Interdisziplinäres Zentrum für Kognitive Studien (1)
- Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftliche Fakultät (1)
- Philosophische Fakultät (1)
No association of goal-directed and habitual control with alcohol consumption in young adults
(2017)
Alcohol dependence is a mental disorder that has been associated with an imbalance in behavioral control favoring model-free habitual over model-based goal-directed strategies. It is as yet unknown, however, whether such an imbalance reflects a predisposing vulnerability or results as a consequence of repeated and/or excessive alcohol exposure. We, therefore, examined the association of alcohol consumption with model-based goal-directed and model-free habitual control in 188 18-year-old social drinkers in a two-step sequential decision-making task while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging before prolonged alcohol misuse could have led to severe neurobiological adaptations. Behaviorally, participants showed a mixture of model-free and model-based decision-making as observed previously. Measures of impulsivity were positively related to alcohol consumption. In contrast, neither model-free nor model-based decision weights nor the trade-off between them were associated with alcohol consumption. There were also no significant associations between alcohol consumption and neural correlates of model-free or model-based decision quantities in either ventral striatum or ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Exploratory whole-brain functional magnetic resonance imaging analyses with a lenient threshold revealed early onset of drinking to be associated with an enhanced representation of model-free reward prediction errors in the posterior putamen. These results suggest that an imbalance between model-based goal-directed and model-free habitual control might rather not be a trait marker of alcohol intake per se.