Increased impulsivity and alterations in reward sensitivity co-occur in many psychiatric disorders. Moreover, individuals reporting more impulsive traits are less efficient in learning stimulus-reward associations. This suggests that impulsivity and reward sensitivity may be linked, consistent with evidence that the orbital frontal cortex (OFC) is implicated in both processes. This study examined the relationship between impulsive traits, assessed by the Barratt Impulsiveness Scale (BIS) and the Eysenck (EIQ), and performance on three behavioral tasks that measure impulsivity and reward sensitivity. The tasks included a Conditioned Pattern Preference (CPP) task, which measures the preference for abstract visual cues as an index of implicit emotional learning, a Probabilistic Reversal Learning (PRL) task that assessed the ability to alter behaviour when reward contingencies change and an Emotional Stroop task which assessed attentional control in response to emotionally salient stimuli. This study provided novel information on the relationship between processes that mediate impulsivity and reward sensitivity. In brief, subjects that were considered to have some explicit knowledge of experimental conditions showed a higher preference formation for the pattern paired with the reward on 90% of the conditioning trials. Although there was no overall effect of impulsivity, the medium impulsive group displayed the strongest preference formation (highest score for the 90% pattern and lowest score for the 10% pattern) compared to the low and high groups. Furthermore, there was an overall effect of Word Category in that participants made more errors for the emotional words (positive and negative) than the neutral words. There was no overall effect of Impulsivity on Stroop performance in this sample. Finally, for the PRL task more participants in the high impulsive group did not meet criterion for the Acquisition stage while more low impulsive subjects did not meet reversal criterion. Furthermore, high impulsive subjects made more overall errors in the Acquisition stage but not Reversal stage. In brief, low and high impulsive subjects performed sub-optimally on the CPP and PRL tasks but not on the Stroop task. This pattern reflects an inverted-U shaped relationship of the effects of impulsivity on associative learning. / Thesis (Master, Psychology) -- Queen's University, 2010-02-05 13:33:27.076