Effort-related decision making and cannabis use among college students.
Cannabis exerts an indirect effect on dopamine (DA) output in the mesolimbic projection, a circuit implicated in reward processing and effort expenditure, and thus may be associated with aberrant effort-based decision making. The amotivation syndrome hypothesis suggests that regular cannabis use results in impaired capacity for goal-directed behavior. However, investigations of this hypothesis have used divergent methodology and have not controlled for key confounding variables. The present study extends these findings by examining the relation between cannabis use and effort-related decision making in a sample of college students. Cannabis using (