Effects of reward and punishment on learning from errors in smokers

Abstract

Background: Punishing errors facilitates adaptation in healthy individuals, while aberrant reward and punishment sensitivity in drug-dependent individuals may change this impact. Many societies have institutions that use the concept of punishing drug use behavior, making it important to understand how drug dependency mediates the effects of negative feedback for influencing adaptive behavior. Methods: Using an associative learning task, we investigated differences in error correction rates of dependent smokers, compared with controls. Two versions of the task were administered to different participant samples: One assessed the effect of varying monetary contingencies to task performance, the..