Effects of reward and punishment on learning from errors in smokers

Punishing errors facilitates adaptation in healthy individuals, while aberrant reward and punishment sensitivity in drug-dependent individuals may change this impact. Many societies have institutions that use the concept of punishing drug use behavior, making it important to understand how drug dependency mediates the effects of negative feedback for influencing adaptive behavior.

Using an associative learning task, we investigated differences in error correction rates of dependent smokers, compared with controls. Two versions of the task were administered to different participant samples: One assessed the effect of varying monetary contingencies to task performance, the other, the presence of reward as compared to avoidance of punishment for correct performance.

While smokers recalled associations that were rewarded with a higher value 11% more often than lower rewarded locations, they did not correct higher punished locations more often. Controls exhibited the opposite pattern. The three-way interaction between magnitude, feedback type and group was significant, F(1,48) = 5.288, p =0.026, ɳ²p =0.099. Neither participant group corrected locations offering reward more often than those offering avoidances of punishment. The interaction between group and feedback condition was not significant, F(1,58) = 0.0, p =0.99, ɳ²p =0.001.

The present results suggest that smokers have poorer learning from errors when receiving negative feedback. Moreover, larger rewards reinforce smokers' behavior stronger than smaller rewards, whereas controls made no distinction. These findings support the hypothesis that dependent smokers may respond to positively framed and rewarded anti-smoking programs when compared to those relying on negative feedback or punishment.