Neurologically Plausible Distinctions in Cognition Relevant to Drug Use Etiology and Prevention

Abstract

This article outlines several distinctions in cognition and related topics in emotion that receive support from work in cognitive neuroscience and have important implications for prevention: implicit cognition, working memory, nonverbal memory, and neurobiological systems of habit. These distinctions have not been widely acknowledged or applied in drug use prevention research, despite their neural plausibility and the availability of methods to make this link. The authors briefly review the basis for the distinctions and indicate general implications and assessment possibilities for prevention researchers conducting large-scale field trials. Subse-quently, the article outlines a connectionist framework for specific applications in prevention interventions. These possibilities begin the attempt to derive useful fusions of normally distinct areas of prevention and cognitive neuroscience, in the spirit of a transdisciplinary approach.

• Executive functioning
• Implicit cognition
• Integrative research
• Nonverbal memory

Notes

¹In Ryan and Cohen's (2000) major review, many pieces of evidence from different paradigms are weighed together in support of multiple systems of memory. Any single study or paradigm in isolation is unlikely to provide sufficient evidence.

²It is also possible that some spontaneously activated associative memories are better classified as examples of involuntary explicit memory (Richardson-Klevehn and Gardiner, 1996), because some conscious recollection of the source of the memory may sometimes occur even though the memory is triggered spontaneously. However, it seems to us that even what has been called involuntary explicit memory probably has a critically important component that is best characterized as implicit, for example, in a dual-route process of automatic activation and conscious recollection such as that proposed for cross-modal repetition priming effects (Schacter and Badgaiyan 2001).

³In a more comprehensive review of human evidence on drug-related circuits, Franken (Franken, 2003) outlined evidence suggesting that changes in motivational systems (e.g., dopaminergic activity), activated by drug cues, affect attention, similar to Path C in Fig. 1. He suggested further that drug craving is a product of attention, and that craving then leads to drug use. The present authors see craving (and similar concepts) as a convenient word describing a number of processes acting jointly or in parallel, including activation of drug-consistent associative memories, neurotransmitter activity, and broadcasts of these activities to attentional or working memory systems. Measures of craving, urges, desires, and the like, can detect these broadcasts to some extent but do not by themselves imply a separate system, process, or entity.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alan W. Stacy

Alan W. Stacy, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor at the Institute for Prevention Research, Department of Preventive Medicine, University of Southern California and the Director of the Transdisciplinary Drug Abuse Prevention Research Center. His research interests include applying theories of associative memory to etiologic models of addiction and health behavior and attempts at new integrations across different research areas, including associative memory, neuroscience, prevention, and drug abuse. He is also attempting to foster additional integrations at the center from other areas (e.g., social networks, anthropology, sociology, etc). He received his doctorate in Social and Personality Psychology from the University of California, Riverside in 1986.

Susan L. Ames

Susan L. Ames, Ph.D., is a Research Associate at the Institute for Prevention Research, Department of Preventive Medicine, University of Southern California and Assistant Research Psychologist at the Center for Research on Substance Abuse in the Department of Psychology, UCLA. Her research interests include implicit cognition in the prediction of substance use, HIV risk behavior, and violence among at-risk populations. She is interested in developing new assessments and prediction models of substance misuse, as well as new prevention and harm reduction strategies for addictive behaviors. Additional interests include neurobiological systems and structures associated with implicit processes and addictive behaviors. She received her doctorate in Preventive Medicine from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, in 2001.

Barbara J. Knowlton

Barbara J. Knowlton, Ph.D., is Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research interests include the neural basis of learning, memory, and executive function. She is interested in differentiating learning systems based on behavioral characteristics and brain mechanisms. Her laboratory studies cognitive functions in neurological populations and uses a number of approaches, including functional neuroimaging techniques and animal models. She is particularly interested in the role of the neostriatum in implicit habit learning. She received her doctorate in Neuroscience from Stanford University in 1990.