Smoking and Learning from Punishment: an fMRI Study

The continuation of nicotine use might be associated with an attenuated processing of punishment feedback, which might cause a deficient adaptation encompassing no regard of the negative health outcomes of smoking and smokers may thus continue using nicotine (Duehlmeyer and Hester, 2019). The authors gave participants an associative learning task while they underwent fMRI. This task gave either monetary reward or monetary punishment in the performance of recall. It was found that in the group of smokers, the recall errors were corrected less than in the control participants. There was found also a diminished difference among high and low punishment conditions of the task.

The fMRI results revealed hyperactivation in the DLPFC in the group of smokers in conditions of recall and re-encoding. In the case when number-location associations were recalled in a faulty manner, the group of smokers showed reduced activation in the DLPFC as compared to control subjects.

It was suggested that the lower error-correction might be due to response inhibition demands in the DLPFC while reward was expected but lower demands when punishment was anticipated. The correction of high punishment and low punishment errors is suggestive of a reduced punishment sensitivity. This was also associated with the somatosensory cortex and motor cortex.

In conclusion, smokers are hypersensitive to reward and hyposensitive to punishment. As a result, they were more impaired in learning from errors (Duehlmeyer and Hester, 2019).