Miriam Sebold, Stephan Nebe, Maria Garbusow, Matthias Guggenmos, Daniel J Schad, Anne Beck, Soeren Kuitunen-Paul, Christian Sommer, Robin Frank, Peter Neu, Ulrich S Zimmermann, Michael A Rapp, Michael N Smolka, Quentin J M Huys, Florian Schlagenhauf, Andreas Heinz
BACKGROUND: Addiction is supposedly characterized by a shift from goal-directed to habitual decision making, thus facilitating automatic drug intake. The two-step task allows distinguishing between these mechanisms by computationally modeling goal-directed and habitual behavior as model-based and model-free control. In addicted patients, decision making may also strongly depend upon drug-associated expectations. Therefore, we investigated model-based versus model-free decision making and its neural correlates as well as alcohol expectancies in alcohol-dependent patients and healthy controls and assessed treatment outcome in patients...
December 1, 2017: Biological Psychiatry