Addiction is a complex disease that impacts millions of people around the world. Clinically,
addiction is formalized as substance use disorder (SUD), with three primary symptom …

Sex differences in motivation for food rewards, gambling, and drugs of abuse are modulated
by multiple factors, including sensory stimuli, gonadal hormones, and cognitive bias. Cues …

Signalling reward delivery with sounds and lights is common practice in electronic games,
and may seem like a superficially harmless feature of game design. Such audiovisual cues …

Motor impulsivity and risk-related decision-making have been proposed as vulnerability
factors for drug abuse, due to their high prevalence in drug abusers. However, how these …

Individuals who use cocaine exhibit maladaptive decision-making, overweighting rewards,
and underweighting potential risks. We previously showed that chronic cocaine self …

Rationale Win-paired stimuli can promote risk taking in experimental gambling paradigms in
both rats and humans. We previously demonstrated that atomoxetine, a noradrenaline …

Acetylcholine is the endogenous agonist for the neuronal nicotinic acetylcholine receptor
(nAChR) system, which is involved in attention, memory, affective behaviours and substance …

Introduction: Women are more vulnerable to cocaine's reinforcing effects and have a more
rapid course to addiction after initial cocaine use as compared to men. Studies in rodents …

Background Both psychostimulant use and engagement with probabilistic schedules of
reward sensitize the mesocorticolimbic dopamine (DA) system. Such behaviors may act …

Learning and memory are important in everyday life as well as in pathological conditions.
The median raphe region (MRR) contributes to memory formation; however, its precise role …