Drug addiction

All addictive drugs have positively reinforcing properties and these are primarily responsible for drug-seeking manners in addicts. Animal operant learning studies have proved useful in investigating both aspects of addiction that are physiological and behavioral. The positive reinforcing properties of a drug can be assessed by self-stimulation studies that measure the extent to which animals commonly rats or monkeys will work to get a dose of the drug.  Conditioned place preference studies reveal that the context in which drugs are taken is important.  Animals are first exposed to one environment when drugged and to a different environment when non-drugged. Subsequently, the animals are given a choice among the two environments (they can now move freely between them) and the time spent in each is recorded. With positively reinforcing drugs an animal’s spend more time in the environment they experienced in the drugged state. This is context-dependent learning and shows which learning is important in addictive behavior.