{"doi":"10.13023/etd.2021.242","title":"THE EFFECTS OF ESCALATED COCAINE INTAKE ON DECISION-MAKING DYNAMICS","abstract":"Cocaine Use Disorder (CUD) is characterized partly by the use of cocaine at the expense of other alternatives, in other words, it is a decision-making pathology (Kalivas & Volkow, 2005). Concurrent choice tasks assess decision-making in a dynamic scenario that more closely resembles real life. Value-based decision-making is an important facet of understanding the addictive properties of drugs of abuse. In order to compare two value-based theories of addiction (habit theory and relative value theory), a concurrent choice task was run in tandem with an escalation procedure. First, animals were trained on a choice task until stable, then trained on to self-administer cocaine (0.3mg/kg to the animal’s weight) using a fixed ratio 1 schedule under 1-hr access. For the escalation procedure, some animals remained on 1-hr access and others were given 6-hr access to cocaine for 21 days. Then all rats returned to 1-hr access. The animals were trained such that they performed the choice task in the morning (while not under the influence of drugs) and then after a rest in the home cage, were put back into the operant boxes for self-administration sessions. Escalation of cocaine intake was evident in the 6-hr exposed animals but intake was stable in the 1-hr exposed animals. The choice behavior between the two groups did not differ, despite differences in intake between the groups. Indicating that despite dysregulated cocaine intake, value-based decision-making and goal-directed behavior remained intact. This supports the idea of looking beyond habit theory as the sole explanation for the change in decision-making behavior seen in CUD.","journal":"UKnowledge (University of Kentucky)","year":2021,"id":226138,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":0,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9569,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2021-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":829657,"name":"McAllister Stephens","orcid":null,"position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":52,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T23:54:34.185847Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}