Saturday, April 26, 2025
4/26/2025
Pavlovian Approaches to Promoting Self-Control - PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT When the future has little value, impulsive choices abound. Steeply discounting the future means a drug-high now is more valuable than future health, wealth and relationships. A large and robust literature reveals that steeply discounting the future is correlated with early substance use, substance-use disorders, and poor outcomes in drug-treatment trials. A small literature suggests that reducing delay discounting improves clinical outcomes in humans. Such findings have motivated nonhuman research seeking to discover interventions that can reduce impulsive decision-making. Those interventions might be adapted to prevention programs designed to reduce childhood impulsivity and adolescent substance use. A practical limitation of the effective nonhuman interventions (some of them conducted in our lab) is their duration (median = 123 operant-training sessions). In preliminary studies, we have obtained comparable reductions in rats' impulsive choice in a fraction of the time by using Pavlovian training methods. When Pavlovian training is complete (8 sessions), the newly established conditioned stimulus (CS) may be used as an antecedent to attract the rat toward the self-control choice; this significantly reduces impulsivity. The CS may also be used as a conditioned-reinforcing consequence that significantly increases future self-control choices. These practical interventions and clinically relevant improvements have obvious translational potential. Before undertaking that translational research, however, we propose two experiments designed to explore how parametrically manipulating training variables known to influence Pavlovian learning impacts the efficacy of these CS-as-antecedent and CS-as-consequence interventions. The knowledge gained from this project will provide a roadmap to guide the design of Pavlovian interventions seeking to prevent impulsive decision-making, and prevent the health deficits associated with those choices.
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