Chronic nicotine use has been linked to increased sensitivity to nondrug rewards as well as improvement in mood among individuals with depression, and these effects have been hypothesized to be mediated through alternations in striatal dopamine activity. Similarly, chronic nicotine use is hypothesized to influence the mechanisms by which healthy and depressed individuals learn about rewards in their environment. However, the specific behavioral and neural mechanisms by which nicotine influences the learning process is poorly understood. Here, we use a probabilistic learning task, functional magnetic resonance imaging and neurocomputational analyses, to show that chronic smoking is associated with higher reward sensitivity, along with lower learning rate and striatal prediction error signal. Further, we show that these effects do not differ between individuals with and without major depressive disorder (MDD). In addition, a negative correlation between reward sensitivity and striatal prediction error signal was found among smokers, consistent with the suggestion that enhanced tonic dopamine associated with increased reward sensitivity leads to an attenuation of phasic dopamine activity necessary for updating of reward value during learning. / Master of Science / Nicotine use has been associated with increased sensitivity to nondrug rewards and improvement in mood among individuals with depression, and these effects maybe attributed to neural activity in the striatum, a brain region related to reward perception and learning. Chronic nicotine may also influence reward learning in healthy and depressed individuals but this influence is poorly understood. Therefore, we use a computerized learning task to measure participants’ behavioral performance, functional magnetic resonance imaging to collect their brain activity data and neurocomputational analyses to examine their learning process. We showthat, compared to nonsmokers, chronic smokers perceive rewards as more rewarding (higher reward sensitivity), they learn the value of a reward slower (lower learningrate) and the neural activity in their striatum is weaker in the learning process. Moreover, we show that these effects do not differ between individuals with and without depression.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/79954 |
| Date | 09 June 2017 |
| Creators | Feng, Shengchuang |
| Contributors | Psychology, Casas, Brooks, Chiu, Pearl H., Li, Jian |
| Publisher | Virginia Tech |
| Source Sets | Virginia Tech Theses and Dissertation |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis, Text |
| Format | application/pdf, application/pdf |
| Rights | In Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
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