Abnormal Attentional Bias of Non-Drug Reward in Abstinent Heroin Addicts: An ERP Study

Drug addicts are characterized by difficulty neglecting monetary reward, but its underlying neural mechanisms remain unclear. The current study aimed to investigate the behavioral and electrophysiological signatures of abnormal attentional bias based on different amounts of reward in abstinent heroin addicts (AHAs). We used a modified attentional capture task while recording EEG in 18 AHAs and 18 age-, gander-, and education-matched healthy controls (HCs). We analyzed the attentional distribution of the relative positional changes in space of the target and reward-related stimulus. When targets integrated reward-related colors, participants were more responsive and deployed more attention to targets, especially those with high-value colors. When targets and reward-related distractors were spatially separated, high-value distractors captured the AHA's attention and slowed their responses. Moreover, AHAs had weaker attentional control than HCs, exhibiting an inability to suppress the attentional bias driven by high-value stimuli. Overall, these results demonstrated that AHAs was hypersensitive to task-irrelevant and previous reward-related stimuli, possibly due to damage to brain reward circuits caused by chronic heroin abuse. Our work provides novel behavioral and neurophysiological evidence that are closely associated with the maintenance and relapse of addiction.