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      Enhancement stimulants: perceived motivational and cognitive advantages

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          Abstract

          Psychostimulants like Adderall and Ritalin are widely used for cognitive enhancement by people without ADHD, although the empirical literature has shown little conclusive evidence for effectiveness in this population. This paper explores one potential explanation of this discrepancy: the possibility that the benefit from enhancement stimulants is at least in part motivational, rather than purely cognitive. We review relevant laboratory, survey, and interview research and present the results of a new survey of enhancement users with the goal of comparing perceived cognitive and motivational effects. These users perceived stimulant effects on motivationally-related factors, especially “ energy” and “ motivation,” and reported motivational effects to be at least as pronounced as cognitive effects, including the effects on “ attention.”

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          The debate over dopamine's role in reward: the case for incentive salience.

          Kent C. Berridge (2007)
          Debate continues over the precise causal contribution made by mesolimbic dopamine systems to reward. There are three competing explanatory categories: 'liking', learning, and 'wanting'. Does dopamine mostly mediate the hedonic impact of reward ('liking')? Does it instead mediate learned predictions of future reward, prediction error teaching signals and stamp in associative links (learning)? Or does dopamine motivate the pursuit of rewards by attributing incentive salience to reward-related stimuli ('wanting')? Each hypothesis is evaluated here, and it is suggested that the incentive salience or 'wanting' hypothesis of dopamine function may be consistent with more evidence than either learning or 'liking'. In brief, recent evidence indicates that dopamine is neither necessary nor sufficient to mediate changes in hedonic 'liking' for sensory pleasures. Other recent evidence indicates that dopamine is not needed for new learning, and not sufficient to directly mediate learning by causing teaching or prediction signals. By contrast, growing evidence indicates that dopamine does contribute causally to incentive salience. Dopamine appears necessary for normal 'wanting', and dopamine activation can be sufficient to enhance cue-triggered incentive salience. Drugs of abuse that promote dopamine signals short circuit and sensitize dynamic mesolimbic mechanisms that evolved to attribute incentive salience to rewards. Such drugs interact with incentive salience integrations of Pavlovian associative information with physiological state signals. That interaction sets the stage to cause compulsive 'wanting' in addiction, but also provides opportunities for experiments to disentangle 'wanting', 'liking', and learning hypotheses. Results from studies that exploited those opportunities are described here. In short, dopamine's contribution appears to be chiefly to cause 'wanting' for hedonic rewards, more than 'liking' or learning for those rewards.
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            Modafinil and methylphenidate for neuroenhancement in healthy individuals: A systematic review.

            Dimitris Repantis, Peter Schlattmann, Oona Laisney … (2010)
            The term neuroenhancement refers to improvement in the cognitive, emotional and motivational functions of healthy individuals through, inter alia, the use of drugs. Of known interventions, psychopharmacology provides readily available options, such as methylphenidate and modafinil. Both drugs are presumed to be in widespread use as cognitive enhancers for non-medical reasons. Based on a systematic review and meta-analysis we show that expectations regarding the effectiveness of these drugs exceed their actual effects, as has been demonstrated in single- or double-blind randomised controlled trials. Only studies with sufficient extractable data were included in the statistical analyses. For methylphenidate an improvement of memory was found, but no consistent evidence for other enhancing effects was uncovered. Modafinil on the other hand, was found to improve attention for well-rested individuals, while maintaining wakefulness, memory and executive functions to a significantly higher degree in sleep deprived individuals than did a placebo. However, repeated doses of modafinil were unable to prevent deterioration of cognitive performance over a longer period of sleep deprivation though maintaining wakefulness and possibly even inducing overconfidence in a person's own cognitive performance. Copyright 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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              Are prescription stimulants "smart pills"? The epidemiology and cognitive neuroscience of prescription stimulant use by normal healthy individuals.

              Martha J. Farah, Philip Smith (2011)
              Use of prescription stimulants by normal healthy individuals to enhance cognition is said to be on the rise. Who is using these medications for cognitive enhancement, and how prevalent is this practice? Do prescription stimulants in fact enhance cognition for normal healthy people? We review the epidemiological and cognitive neuroscience literatures in search of answers to these questions. Epidemiological issues addressed include the prevalence of nonmedical stimulant use, user demographics, methods by which users obtain prescription stimulants, and motivations for use. Cognitive neuroscience issues addressed include the effects of prescription stimulants on learning and executive function, as well as the task and individual variables associated with these effects. Little is known about the prevalence of prescription stimulant use for cognitive enhancement outside of student populations. Among college students, estimates of use vary widely but, taken together, suggest that the practice is commonplace. The cognitive effects of stimulants on normal healthy people cannot yet be characterized definitively, despite the volume of research that has been carried out on these issues. Published evidence suggests that declarative memory can be improved by stimulants, with some evidence consistent with enhanced consolidation of memories. Effects on the executive functions of working memory and cognitive control are less reliable but have been found for at least some individuals on some tasks. In closing, we enumerate the many outstanding questions that remain to be addressed by future research and also identify obstacles facing this research. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved).
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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Journal ID (nlm-ta): Front Neurosci
                Journal ID (iso-abbrev): Front Neurosci
                Journal ID (publisher-id): Front. Neurosci.
                Title: Frontiers in Neuroscience
                Publisher: Frontiers Media S.A.
                ISSN (Print): 1662-4548
                ISSN (Electronic): 1662-453X
                Publication date (Electronic): 31 October 2013
                Publication date Collection: 2013
                Volume: 7
                Electronic Location Identifier: 198
                Affiliations
                Department of Psychology, Center for Neuroscience and Society, University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA, USA
                Author notes

                Edited by: Eleanor Dommett, The Open University, UK

                Reviewed by: Jared W. Young, University of California, San Diego, USA; Claire L. Rostron, The Open University, UK

                *Correspondence: Irena P. Ilieva, Center for Neuroscience and Society, University of Pennsylvania, 3720 Walnut St., Room B51, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA e-mail: iilieva@ 123456sas.upenn.edu

                This article was submitted to Neuropharmacology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience.

                Article
                DOI: 10.3389/fnins.2013.00198
                PMC ID: 3813924
                PubMed ID: 24198755
                SO-VID: 0e6053bb-9ee4-4763-80a8-c4b37a06161c
                Copyright © Copyright © 2013 Ilieva and Farah.
                License:

                This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

                History
                Date received : 10 July 2013
                Date accepted : 10 October 2013
                Page count
                Figures: 0, Tables: 1, Equations: 0, References: 45, Pages: 6, Words: 5418
                Categories
                Subject: Pharmacology
                Subject: Original Research Article

                ScienceOpen disciplines: Neurosciences
                Keywords: cognitive enhancement,prescription stimulants,adderall,ritalin,motivation
                Data availability:
                ScienceOpen disciplines: Neurosciences
                Keywords: cognitive enhancement, prescription stimulants, adderall, ritalin, motivation

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