Alcoholism is a progressive disease related to repeated episodes of alcohol abuse that reduce the brain’s behavioral control and decision-making ability; at the same time, increasing habitual urges combined with increasing bad feelings (i.e., negative affect) promote continued drinking. Frontal cortical brain regions that designate attention and motivation, using information to predict the result of actions (Schoenbaum and Shaham 2008), play a role in addiction development. Frontal cortical dysfunction often is investigated using reversal-learning tasks. In reversal learning, the subject first learns to make one choice (e.g., responding to the black objects in a series of black and white objects) and then has to learn to reverse this choice (e.g., to respond to the white objects). Thus, the initially expected responses suddenly are considered wrong, requiring the subject to exhibit flexible behavior in response to outcomes that do not match those predicted by preceding cues (Stalnaker et al. 2009).
