Porter Joseph H, Prus Adam J, Overton Donald A
Department of Psychology, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA, USA.
Northern Michigan University, Marquette, MI, USA.
Curr Top Behav Neurosci. 2018;39:3-26. doi: 10.1007/7854_2018_40.
Research on the stimulus properties of drugs began with studies on state dependent learning during the first half of the twentieth century. From that research, an entirely new approach evolved called drug discrimination. Animals (including humans) could discriminate the presence or absence of a drug; once learned, the drug could serve as a discriminative stimulus, signaling the availability or nonavailability of reinforcement. Early drug discrimination research involved the use of a T-maze task, which evolved in the 1970s into a two-lever operant drug discrimination task that is still used today. A number of important concepts and principles of drug discrimination are discussed. (1) The discriminative stimulus properties of drugs are believed in large part to reflect the subjective effects of drugs. While it has been impossible to directly measure subjective effects in nonhuman animals, drug discrimination studies in human subjects have generally supported the belief that discriminative stimulus properties of drugs in nonhuman animals correlate highly with subjective effects of drugs in humans. In addition to the ability of the drug discrimination procedure to measure the subjective effects of drugs, it has a number of other strengths that help make it a valuable preclinical assay. (2) Drug discrimination can be used for classification of drugs based on shared discriminative stimulus properties. (3) The phenomena of tolerance and cross-tolerance can be studied with drug discrimination. (4) Discriminative stimulus properties of drugs typically have been found to be stereospecific, if a drug is comprised of enantiomers. (5) Discriminative stimulus properties of drugs reflect specific CNS activity at neurotransmitter receptors. (6) Both human and nonhuman subjects display individual differences in their sensitivity to discriminative stimuli and drugs. (7) The drug discrimination procedure has been used extensively as a preclinical assay in drug development. This chapter is the first in the volume The Behavioural Neuroscience of Drug Discrimination, which includes chapters concerning the discriminative stimulus properties of various classes of psychoactive drugs as well as sections on the applications and approaches for using this procedure.
对药物刺激特性的研究始于20世纪上半叶对状态依赖性学习的研究。从该项研究中，一种全新的方法——药物辨别法应运而生。动物（包括人类）能够辨别药物的存在与否；一旦学会，药物便可充当辨别性刺激物，表明强化物是否可得。早期的药物辨别研究采用T型迷宫任务，该任务在20世纪70年代演变成了双杠杆操作性药物辨别任务，至今仍在使用。文中讨论了药物辨别法的一些重要概念和原则。（1）药物的辨别性刺激特性在很大程度上被认为反映了药物的主观效应。虽然无法直接测量非人类动物的主观效应，但对人类受试者的药物辨别研究总体上支持了这样一种观点，即非人类动物体内药物的辨别性刺激特性与人类体内药物的主观效应高度相关。除了能够测量药物的主观效应外，药物辨别程序还有许多其他优点，使其成为一种有价值的临床前检测方法。（2）药物辨别法可用于根据共同的辨别性刺激特性对药物进行分类。（3）耐受性和交叉耐受性现象可用药物辨别法进行研究。（4）如果一种药物由对映体组成，通常会发现其辨别性刺激特性具有立体特异性。（5）药物的辨别性刺激特性反映了神经递质受体处特定的中枢神经系统活动。（6）人类和非人类受试者对辨别性刺激和药物的敏感性均存在个体差异。（7）药物辨别程序在药物研发中被广泛用作临床前检测方法。本章是《药物辨别行为神经科学》卷中的第一章，该卷还包括有关各类精神活性药物辨别性刺激特性的章节以及关于使用该程序的应用和方法的部分。
