Overshadowing and salience attribution in relation to cannabis use
Schizophrenia Research Cognition May 11, 2024 Christopher Dawes, Samuel Joy McGreal, Shivika Marwaha et al.
Regular cannabis use is linked to abnormalities in how the brain processes salience—the mechanism that determines which stimuli stand out. In a non-clinical adult sample, current cannabis users showed reduced overshadowing (a measure of cue competition and salience processing) during a learning task compared to non-users, with medium effect sizes. Cannabis users also displayed higher implicit aberrant salience on a separate task. Schizotypy or aberrant salience inventory scores did not explain this relationship. The findings suggest that regular cannabis use is associated with altered salience processing, which may relate to the known link between cannabis and psychosis.