Cocaine dependent individuals and gamblers present different associative learning anomalies in feedback-driven decision making: a behavioral and ERP study Torres, Ana Catena Martínez, Andrés Cándido Ortiz, Antonio Maldonado López, Antonio Megías, Alberto Perales López, José César Addiction Cocaine Gambling Reversal learning Feedback-related negativity Decision-making The research presented here has been funded by grants from the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, MICINN (Spain), for Ana Torres and José C. Perales (ref. # PSI2009-13133), and Andrés Catena and Antonio Maldonado (ref. # PSI2009-12217); by a Junta de Andalucía (Spain) grant (ref. # PB09-SEJ4752) for Antonio Cándido: and by a RETICS (Redes Temáticas de Investigación Cooperativa en Salud) subprogramme grant (ref. # RD12/0028/0017) from the Ministerio de Sanidad, Políticas Sociales e Igualdad for José C. Perales. We would like to thank Proyecto Hombre’s Málaga and Granada centers, and AGRAJER (Asociación Granadina de Jugadores de Azar en Rehabilitación) for their invaluable and disinterested collaboration. Several recent studies have demonstrated that addicts behave less flexibly than healthy controls in the probabilistic reversal learning task (PRLT), in which participants must gradually learn to choose between a probably rewarded option and an improbably rewarded one, on the basis of corrective feedback, and in which preferences must adjust to abrupt reward contingency changes (reversals). In the present study, pathological gamblers (PG) and cocaine dependent individuals (CDI) showed different learning curves in the PRLT. PG also showed a reduced electroencephalographic response to feedback (Feedback-Related Negativity, FRN) when compared to controls. CDI’s FRN was not significantly different either from PG or from healthy controls. Additionally, according to Standardized Low-Resolution Electromagnetic Tomography analysis, cortical activity in regions of interest (previously selected by virtue of their involvement in FRN generation in controls) strongly differed between CDI and PG. However, the nature of such anomalies varied within-groups across individuals. Cocaine use severity had a strong deleterious impact on the learning asymptote, whereas gambling intensity significantly increased reversal cost. These two effects have remained confounded in most previous studies, which can be hiding important associative learning differences between different populations of addicts. 2021-05-14T11:55:09Z 2021-05-14T11:55:09Z 2013-03-18 info:eu-repo/semantics/article Torres A, Catena A, Cándido A, Maldonado A, Megías A and Perales JC (2013) Cocaine dependent individuals and gamblers present different associative learning anomalies in feedback-driven decision making: a behavioral and ERP study. Front. Psychol. 4:122. doi: [10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00122] http://hdl.handle.net/10481/68535 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00122 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/es/ info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess Atribución 3.0 España Frontiers Research Foundation