Assessing Habitual, Goal-Directed, and Pavlovian Influences in Alcohol Use Disorder

Plain-language summary

The first aim of this study is to establish the role of maladaptive reliance on habits for impaired control in addiction, employing a novel task - the Action-Sequence-Task (AST), which assesses interference between habitual and goal-directed control. The AST, along with the developed computational model, will be employed to test whether participants with Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD) and control participants differ with respect to task performance and estimated model parameters. The investigators hypothesize stronger habitual behavior (increased habitual tendency) and an increased susceptibility to conflict between habitual and goal-directed control, measured as increased interference, are associated with AUD. The second aim of the study is to understand whether Pavlovian-to-Instrumental Transfer (PIT) reflects more of a controlled, goal-directed process, or a more automatic, habitual process. The investigators will use the single-lever PIT task as it is an efficient tool for testing the interaction between Pavlovian cues and instrumental behavior, especially when they are in conflict. In these trials, top-down control must be allocated to successfully overcome the conflict, which may share some common underlying mechanisms with the arbitration between goal-directed and habitual behavior during conflict, as assessed by the novel AST. The third aim of the study is to investigate whether severely dependent AUD patients would show a stronger PIT effect compared to a control group, consistent with the investigators' previous findings.

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