Reward learning in cannabis users – Preliminary data from an fMRI study

Introduction: Recently, there has been consider-able interest in possible abnormalities of decision-making processes in drug abusers, including chronic cannabis abusers. Most of these studies administered the Iowa Gambling Task, a behavioral task that affords participants to learn to discriminate between response options that differ with regard to their short- and long-term outcomes. Unfortunately, the complex structure of the task hampers the identification of the specific cognitive processes that are responsible for faulty performance: It has been argued that some of the problems observed in patient population…