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

Recruiting now

Conditions studied: Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD), Alcoholism, Substance Use Disorders

In brief

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.

Key facts

Study ID

NCT06701500

Run by

Technische Universität Dresden

People needed

180

Starts

2024-03-02

Expected to finish

2027-06-30

Last updated by the study team

2024-11-22

Who can join

Age: 18 and older, up to 65. Sex: any. Healthy volunteers: accepted.

You may qualify if…

• 18-65 years of age
• AUD subjects only: meet 4 or more criteria for DSM-5 alcohol use disorder
• Sufficient motor skills and visual acuity to use PC
• Ability to consent to the study and complete the questionnaires
• Sufficient German skills

You may not qualify if…

• Lifetime diagnosis of DSM-5 bipolar disorder, schizophrenia or schizophrenia spectrum disorder
• Current diagnosis of severe major depression according to DSM-5, or presence of suicidal intention
• Pregnancy
• Severe withdrawal symptoms
• Acute drug intoxication at the appointments

Where it is running

• Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Technische Universität Dresden — Dresden, Germany (enrolling)

Full record on ClinicalTrials.gov

Trial information comes from ClinicalTrials.gov and is refreshed daily. TrialsForMe does not provide medical care and does not run the studies it lists.