Investigating decision making and its impact on corticospinal excitability in young binge drinkers.

In everyday life, human beings are constantly facing different actions opportunities requiring them to make a decision. To do so, they have to negotiate between promoting speed or accuracy, a challenge known as the speed accuracy trade-off (SAT). In some populations, the SAT appears to be deficient. Specifically, compulsive behaviours such as patients suffering from alcohol use disorder (AUD) are known to put emphasis on accuracy by gathering more information than healthy subjects (HCs) before making a decision. A continuum hypothesis between AUD and binge drinking (i.e., alternation between excessive alcohol intakes and withdrawal periods) has emerged. Suggesting a link between these two populations brought in a new question: Do binge drinkers (BDs) show a compulsive behaviour and is it related to corticospinal excitability changes? In the present study, we selected 20 BDs and 19 HCs to take part in a gathering information task (i.e., tokens task). During this task we also collected neurophysiological data by applying double-coil transcranial magnetic stimulation. Our data showed no difference both a the behavioural and physiological level suggesting that binge drinking does not influence decision making. Indeed, BDs did not gather more information than HCs to make their decision.