Matching Treatments to Cognitive Deficits in Offenders With Substance Use Disorders

Conditions

• Antisocial Behavior

Eligibility Criteria

Sex

MALE

Age

18 Years - 55 Years

Healthy Volunteers

Not accepted

Interventions

• Attention to Context (ATC) training — BEHAVIORAL
  ATC training focuses on learning to attend to and integrate contextual cues present in the environment. Three tasks, Reversal Learning, Divided Visual Field, and Affective Gaze, require ATC functioning and provide individuals with practice noticing changes in contextual information, such as rule changes and using emotion information to modulate behavior.
• Affective Cognitive Control (ACC) training — BEHAVIORAL
  ACC training focuses on providing individuals with practice inhibiting behavior, particularly within motivational or affective contexts. Three tasks, Shapes, Numbers, and Lottery, tap ACC functioning and place demands on the basic employment of cognitive control, such as task switching, as well as on the concurrent engagement of cognitive control and affective processing.

Study Details

The goal of this clinical trial is to investigate the effect of two types of cognitive remediation training on real-world behavioral outcomes including substance use, institutional adjustment, and recidivism following release from prison. Each training type is designed to target one of two subtypes of antisocial criminal offenders, who are characterized by either: 1) Attention to context-based deficits, or 2) Affective cognitive control-based deficits. The main questions it aims to answer are: Does matching deficit type with targeted cognitive training improve outcomes (relative to mismatched training)? What are the functional brain mechanisms that underlie treatment change? Participants will: Be assigned to cognitive training that either does or does not match their deficit type. Complete six one-hour sessions of cognitive skills training. Complete pre and post-training behavioral tasks assessing self-regulation deficits. Complete structural MRI scans and functional MRI scans assessing cognitive control. Complete post-treatment follow-up assessments evaluating self-regulation, adjustment, and stressful life events, substance use and recidivism.

Key Dates

Start date

Mar 18, 2025

Status verified

Apr 2025

Primary completion

May 31, 2029

Completion

May 31, 2029

Study Design

Enrollment

288 participants (estimated)

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Intervention model

PARALLEL

Primary purpose

TREATMENT

Arms

• Experimental: Attention to context deficit
  Participants with attention to context deficits will receive treatment either targeted towards their specific deficit (matched) or towards affective cognitive control deficits (mismatched).
• Experimental: Affective Cognitive Control deficit
  Participants with affective cognitive control deficits will receive treatment either targeted towards their specific deficit (matched) or towards attention to context deficits (mismatched).
• Experimental: No psychopathology
  Participants in the no psychopathology group will receive one of the two treatment types (ATC or ACC).

Primary Outcome Measure

Cognitive task performance - Stroop [ Time Frame: From enrollment to end of treatment at six weeks ]

Central Contacts

• Carla Harenski
  505-272-5028
  [email protected]

Locations (1)

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