Participants with methamphetamine use disorder explored uncertain options less and learned more slowly than controls in a decision task. Increasing bodily anxiety through breathing resistance did not significantly explain those group differences. The experiment therefore did not support a simple account in which induced anxiety caused the observed decision pattern.
Goldman and colleagues studied 56 treatment-seeking participants with methamphetamine use disorder and 58 healthy comparisons. Participants performed the Horizon Task with and without resistance to inhalation. Choosing a less familiar option could provide information useful for later choices. Computational modeling separated directed information-seeking from other sources of variation in decisions.
Breathing resistance increased reported anxiety. Nevertheless, the researchers did not find the anticipated effect of the aversive state on the exploration and learning differences. A successful manipulation of anxiety is not evidence that every proposed downstream consequence occurred. The group differences were observed across the tested breathing conditions.
Additional analyses suggested greater avoidance of uncertainty and differences in cognitive reflectiveness as possible explanations for reduced exploration. Those analyses generate mechanisms to investigate; they do not show that a person will refuse treatment, cannot tolerate withdrawal or is incapable of considering alternatives. The task used points and uncertain options rather than an actual decision about stopping methamphetamine.
The methamphetamine group was in treatment and abstinent, and differed from controls in clinical characteristics. Dependence itself was not experimentally assigned, so causal claims about long-term drug effects remain limited. A February 2025 preprint preceded the journal report in Communications Psychology; these are versions of the same study, rather than independent replications. The central distinction remains between an observational group comparison and an experimentally manipulated bodily state, with different inferential strength for each.
See also different ways to measure cognitive flexibility.
Journal report (DOI: 10.1038/s44271-025-00269-8); earlier preprint (DOI: 10.1101/2024.05.17.24307491).