Response Perseveration in Stimulant Dependence Is Associated with Striatal Dysfunction and Can Be Ameliorated by a D2/3 Receptor Agonist

“…3). The former result is consistent with Ersche et al (2011) who showed a perseverative impairment in SUD. The finding of the opposite change in OCD, meanwhile, demonstrates that the stimulus stickiness measure in our model was able to detect subtleties of behaviour across diagnostic categories which were not clearly delineated using conventional methods.…”

“…In line with Ersche et al. (2011), the SUD group required more trials per sequence than both the healthy controls ( t (191) = − 12.046, p = 3.19 × 10 −25 ), and the OCD group ( t (187) = − 15.925, p = 1.26 × 10 −36 ), and the same pattern was observed for spontaneous errors: the SUD group made more spontaneous errors than the healthy controls ( t (170) = − 24.657, p = 4.30 × 10 −58 ) and the OCD group ( t (169) = − 25.448, p = 1.02 × 10 −59 ). Pairwise comparisons on the number of probabilistic switches produced the same pattern of results as in our first simulation analysis, where neither stimulus nor side stickiness were fixed values: Both the SUD ( t (198) = − 4.861, p = 2 × 10 −6 ) and OCD groups ( t (183) = − 7.484, p = 2.93 × 10 −12 ) showed greater probabilistic switching compared to controls, and the OCD group demonstrated more probabilistic switching than the SUD group ( t (198) = 2.547, p = 0.012).…”

“…3). These results align with the original Ersche et al (2011) data showing diminished win-stay behaviour (more spontaneous errors) in SUD and increased probabilistic switching (lose-shift) in both SUD and OCD. Ersche et al (2016), on the other hand, found individuals with SUD were impaired in both reward and avoidance learning, a contrast likely due to several important task differences.…”