Ambulatory assessment of cue-reactivity during naturalistic cue exposure in gamblers.

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Jan Peters
• Subject Area: Biological Psychiatry ; Human Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 502778657

The concept of “cue-reactivity”, which refers to conditioned neuronal and psychophysiological responses to addiction-related cues, plays a central role in human addiction neuroscience, with respect to both substance use disorders and behavioral addictions such as gambling disorder. Despite the prevalence of the concept and numerous studies investigating the clinical utility of cue-reactivity measures (e.g. for investigating treatment efficacy or prediction of clinical outcomes), meta-analyses revealed substantial heterogeneity with respect to implicated neuronal systems and effect sizes. One contributing factor might be a lack of ecological validity of the standard cue-reactivity paradigm, which typically involves exposure to simple unimodal visual cues in the lab. Here I propose to improve ecological validity of subjective and psychophysiological cue-reactivity measures by combining GPS-based geolocation tracking and ambulatory psychophysiological assessment during naturalistic cue exposure in gamblers. Gambling is linked to specific venues (slot machine casinos, betting facilities) located throughout urban environments, and I propose to leverage these salient environmental cues to investigate cue-reactivity in gamblers in a field setting. Frequent gamblers and matched controls will move along pre-determined urban routes while subjective craving and psychophysiological cue-reactivity are assessed using electronic momentary assessment and ambulatory psychophysiology, respectively. Geolocation is tracked via GPS. Subjective and psychophysiological cue-reactivity in gamblers are predicted to be shaped by both direct exposure to cue locations and expectation effects specific to familiar urban routes. Results will shed light on whether cue-reactivity, a central concept in human addiction neuroscience, can be measured during cue exposure in a field setting, and whether it is shaped by expectation, as predicted by reinforcement learning theories.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants