Abstract
Nicotine produces robust stimulus effects that can be conditioned to form associations with reinforcing nondrug stimuli. We examine how established associations to the nicotine stimulus may be weakened via the overexpectation effect. In two experiments, we separately conditioned sucrose associations to the interoceptive nicotine stimulus (0.4 mg/kg, SC) and to a “noisy” exteroceptive contextual stimulus (oscillating houselight and white noise) via the discriminated goal-tracking task. Thereafter, we presented additional sucrose pairings with the nicotine and noisy stimuli, now in compound. Testing of the conditioned goal-tracking evoked by the nicotine and noisy stimuli in isolation—before versus after compound conditioning (Experiment 1) or between treatment and control groups (Experiment 2)—demonstrated an attenuation of conditioned responding via the overexpectation effect. We suggest that applications of the overexpectation effect may provide some promise for treatments seeking to attenuate drug-evoked conditioned responses in situations where extinction-based interventions are not suitable.
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Data and the Med-Associates programs used in this research are available upon request.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Trevor Geary, Tiffany Schultz, and Stephanie Savala for help in conducting daily experimental sessions. The Med-Associates programs used in this research, or a more recent version, are available upon request.
Funding
The authors and this research were in part supported by two grants from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (DA023951 and DA034389). The authors declare no conflicts of interest in relation to the work reported herein.
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Barrett, S.T., Tracy, M.E. & Bevins, R.A. Use of the overexpectation effect to reduce conditioned seeking behavior controlled by nicotine. Psychon Bull Rev (2024). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-024-02524-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-024-02524-1