Electrophysiological Responses to Alcohol Cues Are Not Associated with Pavlovian-to-Instrumental Transfer in Social Drinkers

Abstract

Pavlovian to Instrumental Transfer (PIT) refers to the behavioral phenomenon of increased instrumental responding for a reinforcer when in the presence of Pavlovian conditioned stimuli that were separately paired with that reinforcer. PIT effects may play an important role in substance use disorders, but little is known about the brain mechanisms that underlie these effects in alcohol consumers. We report behavioral and electroencephalographic (EEG) data from a group of social drinkers (n = 31) who performed a PIT task in which they chose between two instrumental responses in pursuit of beer and chocolate reinforcers while their EEG reactivity to beer, chocolate and neutral pictorial cues was recorded. We examined two markers of the motivational salience of the pictures: the P300 and slow wave event-related potentials (ERPs). Results demonstrated a behavioral PIT effect: responding for beer was increased when a beer picture was presented. Analyses of ERP amplitudes demonstrated significantly larger slow potentials evoked by beer cues at various electrode clusters. Contrary to hypotheses, there were no significant correlations between behavioral PIT effects, electrophysiological reactivity to the cues, and individual differences in drinking behaviour. Our findings are the first to demonstrate a PIT effect for beer, accompanied by increased slow potentials in response to beer cues, in social drinkers. The lack of relationship between behavioral and EEG measures, and between these measures and individual differences in drinking behaviour may be attributed to methodological features of the PIT task and to characteristics of our sample.

The propositional basis of cue-controlled reward seeking

“…Furthermore, the cueing effect was entirely abolished in participants who reported no expectancy that the cues signalled the effective R-O relation. This also replicates the sub-group 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 Propositional cue-control 24 analysis of Hogarth et al (2014). The only divergence was the failure of instructions to significantly reduce participants' self-reported expectancies that cues signalled the effective R-O relation.…”

“…The only divergence was the failure of instructions to significantly reduce participants' self-reported expectancies that cues signalled the effective R-O relation. This discrepancy may be due to insensitivity of the continuous self-report measure in the current experiment compared to binary measure obtained in Hogarth et al (2014).…”

“…Moreover, recent PIT experiments using such rewards suggest that cue control is mediated by a propositional process (Hogarth et al, 2014); participants appear to interpret the presence of the cue as indicative of which response-outcome relation will be effective. The aim of the current experiments was to further explore whether stimuli can exert automatic control over instrumental responding, using a task that might encourage greater expression of the O-R link mechanism.…”

Brain processing of visual metaphors: An electrophysiological study

“…We focused our analysis on an approach that has been widely used in psychophysiology: the examination of topographic changes in EEG activity (cf. Brunet, Murray, & Michel, 2011;Laganaro, Valente, & Perret, 2012;Martinovic et al, 2014;Murray, Brunet, & Michel, 2008). This approach considers whole-scalp EEG activity elicited by a stimulus as a finite set of alternating spatially stable activation patterns, which reflect a succession of information processing stages.…”

Gamma absolute power reveals activation of motor areas after hand immobilization

“…Left-handed individuals were also excluded from the experiment. The subjects were instructed not to use tobacco, coffee 15 or alcoholic drinks 16 10 hours before the test because these substances may influence cortical activation recorded by QEEG brain mapping. 17,18 The study was approved by the ethics committee of Veiga de Almeida University and complied with the ethical standards of the Declaration of Helsinki.…”