NCT03846271

Effects of Oxytocin on Reinforcement Learning

The Effects of Intranasal Oxytocin on Reward Sensitivity and Performance Monitoring During Reinforcement Learning: an ERP Study

• Status: Unknown
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 40 (estimated)
• Sponsor: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China · Academic / Other
• Sex: Male
• Age: 18 Years – 30 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

The main aim of the study is to investigate whether intranasal oxytocin (24IU) influences reward sensitivity and performance monitoring during reinforcement learning.

Detailed description

A double-blind, within-subject, placebo-controlled pharmacological EEG design will be employed. A total of 35 healthy male subjects will be recruited which will receive either intranasal placebo or oxytocin (24IU) on two separate study days (order counter-balanced, washout period at least 2 weeks). 45 minutes after treatment subjects will undergo a probabilistic feedback reinforcement learning paradigm with concurrent EEG acquisition. During the paradigm subjects will learn the reward probabilities of two different visual stimuli from probabilistic feedback provided by social stimuli (positive, negative emoticon). The paradigm includes an initial acquisition phase and a subsequent test phase.

Conditions

• Learning Disabilities

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
DRUG	intranasal oxytocin	24 IU of oxytocin nasal spray will be applied to each subject.
DRUG	intranasal placebo	an identical amount of placebo nasal spray will be applied to each subject.

Timeline

• Start date: 2018-12-04
• Primary completion: 2019-03-31
• Completion: 2019-07-31
• First posted: 2019-02-19
• Last updated: 2019-02-19

Locations

1 site across 1 country: China