Prior to beginning work on this discussion, read the required chapters from the text and review the required articles for this week. Alcohol and caffeine have nearly opposite effects on behavior and the nervous system, yet these substances are not used to treat overdose or addiction to the other. Why not use caffeine to treat alcohol addiction? Analyze the issues of pharmacological and physiological antagonism. Explain the receptor systems involved and the central nervous system structures effects with regard to this question. Frame your analysis in terms of drug action first and other consequences second.
This rea- soning follows from research suggesting that maintenance rehearsal predominantly enhances familiarity (Fawcett et al., 2016; Gardiner et al., 1994). Instead, the current find- ings suggest that value encourages deeper elaborative encoding and semantic processing, as these encoding strategies are linked with later recollection (Fawcett et al., 2016; Gardiner et al., 1994). This selective increase in elaborative encoding for high value items may render them more distinctive than low value items, which may also lead to a relative increase in recollection (Rajaram, 1998).
Because high-value items were more likely to be recol- lected than low-value items, we tested whether high-value items were encoded in a way which made them more likely to be bound to the study context. Research suggests that cues indicating high value activate neural reward cen- ters in the brain, such as the ventral tegmental area and the nucleus accumbens (Adcock et al., 2006; Carter et al., 2009). High-value items may receive enhanced hippocam- pal processing during encoding via activation of projec- tions from these mesolimbic dopaminergic regions. However, contrary to our initial hypothesis, we did not find evidence that value enhances binding of items to inciden- tal details in the context. Rather, high value appears to have resulted in enhanced encoding of the valuable item, and the associated increase in recollection may be based on internally-generated thoughts associated with the item being brought back at test. Such a use of the recollection response is common when contextual details are not retrieved (Gardiner et al., 1998). While the retrieval of details about the external context is often considered a suf- ficient condition for recollection, it is not a necessary one. Retrieval of internally-generated encoding context may be the basis of a recollection judgment. In our study, recollec- tion responses were actually associated with less retrieval of external contextual details (i.e., word color) for valuable items, suggesting that participants often selectively encoded the valuable items at the expense of encoding these extraneous details.
