Projects

Behavioral disinhibition and early-onset alcoholism (R01 from NIH/NIAAA awarded to Dr. Finn; through 2013). This competing continuation investigates the cognitive, motivational, personality, and psychopathological factors that contribute to poor decision-making and behavioral undercontrol in young adults with alcoholism. It extends research conducted during the initial 5 year phase of the project by (1) adopting a dimensional approach to investigate the heterogeneity in alcohol dependence (AD) and mechanisms that are common to AD’s covariance with other externalizing (EXT) disorders, or unique to AD and other externalizing problems, (2) incorporating a manipulation of working memory (WM) load to more specifically investigate the moderating role of WM capacity on behavioral disinhibition and to model the state-effects of increased demands on WM capacity that influence poor decisions/behavior in everyday life, and (3) using computational models (e.g., the expectancy-valence model; Busemeyer & Stout, 2002) to quantify the influence on decision making of self-regulatory processes, such as attention to gains, choice consistency, and memory for recent events, and to assess the specific cognitive-motivational processes that are impacted by increased WM load in those with EXT disorders. The findings are expected to illustrate more fully cognitive and motivational processes, and their interaction, as mechanisms associated with the patterns of behavioral disinhibition observed in AD and EXT disorders.

Attention-biases and hot cognition in drug dependence (R01-DA017924-01 from NIH/NIDA awarded to Dr. Finn; 01.01.05-12.31.10). This project examines visual attentional biases to reward stimuli in drug-dependent individuals and how such biases are associated with various personality constructs (such as impulsivity), antisocial traits, as well as cognitive performance on tasks involving category learning and multidimensional similarity judments. An important question we are addressing is how contextual factors might influence and support attentional biases in those with subtsance use and dependence. The central hypothesis underlying this work is that drug-dependent individuals pay more attention to reward cues in general even when there is explicit cost involved for attending to those cues and that this bias is associated with impulsivity, antisocial behavior, and difficulties learning to ignore drug-related stimuli. We use eye-tracking methodology to asses the spatio-temporal dynamics of visual attention deployment in addition to various cogniitve-science approaches (e.g., multidimensional scaling, task-switching, computational/neural-network modeling) and multivariate statistical modeling (e.g., SEM) to explore the association between drug abuse/dependence and personality dimensions such as impulsivity, harm avoidance, and excitement (sensation) seeking.

Cognitive modeling of risky decision in substance abuse Dr. Finn is co-investigator on this NIH/NIDA funded R01 project in collaboration with Dr. Julie Stout and Dr. Jerry Busemeyer. This project involves developing mathematical models that represent critical mechanisms underlying decisional processes in gambling-type tasks and then using the models to better understand decision-making processes associated with poly-drug abuse.