View clinical trials related to Reward.
Filter by:The dopamine agonist pramipexole has recently been suggested as a potential novel antidepressant drug. While preliminary clinical data hint at its efficacy in treating depressive symptoms, our current understanding of its impact on neurocognitive processes is relatively limited. This is in part because mechanistic studies have largely focused on the effects of single-dose treatments. However, such acute administration of dopaminergic drugs likely has different cognitive effects than the more prolonged administration that is used clinically. This study therefore aims to explore and characterise the neurocognitive effects of more prolonged pramipexole treatment. Forty healthy volunteers will be randomly allocated to 12 to 15 days of treatment with either pramipexole or placebo. Study participants as well as researchers will be blinded as to which treatment is used. Before and after treatment all participants will perform a set of psychological tasks and questionnaires evaluating reward-based learning, emotional information processing, motivational vigour and subjective experience. Furthermore, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) will be used to compare neural activity during emotion and reward processing between the two treatment groups. We hypothesises that pramipexole might enhance reward sensitivity, motivational vigour, and pleasure experience and could induce positive biases in emotional information processing.
This project aims to investigate the effect of modafinil on motivation, creativity, cognitive performance, and subjective wellbeing in healthy participants. The main task for this research project is to address how this novel stimulant acutely influences motivation, divergent and convergent thinking, cognitive performance and subjective wellbeing in non-sleep deprived healthy young adults.This is a randomised between-subjects parallel group design study. Based on the hypothesis that psychostimulants might enhance creativity through the increase in of dopamine and executive planning in healthy adults , we predict that healthy individuals who are in the modafinil condition will perform better in the motivation, creativity, and the cognitive performance tasks. Furthermore, based on the evidence that modafinil increases dopamine in the nucleus accumbens, putamen and the caudate, we expect specific subjective well-being and pleasure enhancement associated with modafinil use in healthy young adults.
The purpose of this study is to determine whether THC, the main psychoactive ingredient in cannabis, affects functional brain systems underlying memory and reward.