Effect of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) on reinforcement learning in humans.
Psychological medicine October 1, 2023 Jonathan W Kanen, Qiang Luo, Mojtaba Rostami Kandroodi et al. 44 citations
LSD increases the rate at which people learn from both rewards and punishments during a probabilistic reversal learning task, suggesting a state of heightened learning plasticity. Healthy volunteers given intravenous LSD or placebo completed a task where they had to learn which of three stimuli was most often rewarded, with the reward contingencies later reversing. Computational modeling of reinforcement learning showed that LSD primarily enhanced the reward learning rate and also elevated the punishment learning rate, while decreasing stimulus stickiness (a measure of choice repetition), indicating increased exploration. These effects point to a potential mechanism by which LSD could help revise maladaptive associations in clinical treatment.