Semester

Fall

Date of Graduation

2024

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Type

MS

College

Eberly College of Arts and Sciences

Department

Psychology

Committee Chair

Mariya Cherkasova

Committee Member

Andy Lattal

Committee Member

Ryan Best

Abstract

Previous research has shown that animals vary in the degree to which they attribute incentive salience to reward predictive cues. In Pavlovian conditioning, two behavioral phenotypes emerge: goal-tracking (GT), in which animals approach the site of the reward, and sign-tracking (ST), in which animals approach the conditioned stimulus and interact with it as if it has become a reward in its own right. ST has been associated with higher rates of impulsivity, drug reinstatement, and relapse, and is thought to confer addiction vulnerability. Though some studies have suggested that similar phenotypes exist in humans and are possibly related to addiction proneness, these studies have relied on different paradigms for identifying these phenotypes, and the translational validity of ST and GT phenotypes remains an area of active research. The present study aimed to cross-validate two major paradigms that have been used to study sign-tracking in humans: 1) Pavlovian conditioned approach in the Pavlovian-to-instrumental transfer (PIT) paradigm and 2) the value-modulated attentional capture (VMAC) task. In addition, it examined the effect of sign-tracking on perception of conditioned stimuli using binocular rivalry. The findings suggested that measures of sign-tracking yielded by the two paradigms are unrelated. Importantly, because the VMAC task design deviated from that in prior literature, it remains undetermined whether PIT-based PCA and VMAC measures are similar versus unrelated constructs. Results did not suggest an effect of Pavlovian-conditioned stimuli on perceptual inference, regardless of phenotype classification.

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