Role of Pavlovian Mechanisms for Control Over Substance Use

During the first funding period (1st FP), the investigators developed a novel full Pavlovian-to-instrumental transfer (PIT) task that allows assessing both, general and specific PIT to investigate whether specific PIT differs between alcohol use disorder (AUD) and control subjects. Preliminary analyses of the full transfer task indicate that AUD participants exhibit a stronger specific PIT effect compared to controls. Based on these findings, the investigators want to compare specific and general PIT effects in patients with moderate to severe substance use disorders (alcohol, cannabis, methamphetamine, amphetamine and cocaine) to healthy controls on the behavioral and neural level (fMRI).