Heroin Abstainers Deficits Conflict Inhibition Toward Heroin Cues

Drug addiction is a main feature of the attention control defects as well as a strong impulse in the cause of compulsive drug seeking and using.Currently,research in the field of addiction usually focuses on two aspects: On the one hand,it mainly studies the attentional bias of drug addicts through Dot-Probe tasks.On the other hand,some classic tasks are used to study the limitation of the inhibition ability of drug addicts.However,few studies have examined the interaction between the attention bias and inhibitory function of the addicted population,which is the cognitive basis of relapse after withdrawal of drug addicts.Therefore,we adopt classic Flanker task in our study.As a baseline,the difference between the heroin addict and the normal control group was observed to indicate whether there was a reversibility of the conflict inhibition ability through withdrawal.This study conducted one experiment involving 30 heroin abstainers 30 matched controls(25–50years old,all males).The experiment employed a 2×2 mixed model design.It was found that the response time of the addiction group was significantly longer than that of the normal group.Moreover,the Flanker effect of the addiction group was significantly greater than that of the normal group.It is suggested that the inhibition ability of addicts in withdrawal period is worse than that of normal people and may not be reversible.Psychological models of drug addiction propose that through repeated pairings,cues and stimuli that are often found to co-occur with the presence of a drug-reward,and consequently can be perceived as signalling the availability of the drug-reward,acquire strong incentive motivational properties through classical conditioning.Research during the past decade has shown that these drug-associated stimuli(relative to nondrug-related stimuli)are able to grab attention(attentional bias),induce subjective craving and guide behaviour towards obtaining the substance.The study of two conducted the experiment employed a 2×2×2 mixed model design.We used a dual task that probed attentional distraction by heroin-related stimuli during‘conflict' processing.Percentages of correct responses to the target and reaction time of correct responses(latency)were recorded.(1)Latencies increased in the presence of the heroin-related images relative to the neutral displays,but only under high cognitive load.(2)Response accuracy did not show this significant difference.In summary,we investigated the differences between heroin abstainers and controls in their direct measure of cognitive control.The results show that heroin abstainers were required to exert cognitive control to suppress the processing of background,task-unrelated heroin-associated stimuli and concentrate on a flanker task,which is thought to tap attentional control processes directly.Heroin abstainers would need to exert cognitive control to focus on the target and ignore both the task-irrelevant heroin-related stimuli and the incongruent flankers.The results show that the attention bias of heroin addicts in the withdrawal period will affect their conflict inhibition ability,and then the risk of relapse.