The relationship between regular substance use and cost comparisons in stable and volatile learning contexts

Insensitivity to costs during cost-benefit decision-making consistently has been related to substance use severity. However, little work has manipulated cost information to examine how people evaluate and compare multiple costs. Further, no work has examined how the consideration of cost information varies across different contexts. We administered a new loss-frame variant of a probabilistic learning task in a diverse community sample enriched for substance use (N = 137). Individuals with more years of regular substance use tended not to repeat choices after they avoided losses, choosing similarly regardless of whether they had avoided or incurred a loss. Computational modeling parameters indicated that they were more inconsistent in their use of expected values to guide choice. These results contribute to our conceptualization of substance use severity by suggesting that inconsistency in using cost information, rather than insensitivity to costs, may inform choices to continue using substances despite incurring negative consequences.