Comparing single and cumulative dosing procedures in human triazolam discriminators.
You can finish a full drug-discrimination curve in one long session instead of four short ones.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Adults without disabilities learned to tell when they had taken the sleep drug triazolam.
Each person tried two ways of testing. In one way they took single doses across four separate days. In the other way they took small added doses in one long session.
The team compared how well each method taught the adults to say, "Yes, I feel the drug."
What they found
The one-session method worked just as well as the four-day method.
Adults could still feel the drug and report it correctly.
Some rating scales shifted a little, but the main drug cue stayed strong.
How this fits with other research
Mellitz et al. (1983) saw a different story in rats. Cumulative dosing made some drugs look stronger and others weaker. The rat study warned that stacking doses can change the numbers.
The new human study keeps the drug effect the same, so the rat warning may not apply to human drug-discrimination work.
Capriotti et al. (2017) and Chesbrough et al. (2024) also used alternating-treatments designs. Like the drug study, they showed that faster methods can match the old way without hurting results.
Why it matters
If you run drug-discrimination or other single-case studies, you can save three sessions by using cumulative dosing. Fewer sessions mean less time, lower cost, and happier participants. Just check that the shortcut does not change your target effect, especially when you switch species or tasks.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
This study evaluated a cumulative dosing procedure for drug discrimination with human participants. Four participants learned to discriminate triazolam (0.35 mg/70 kg) from placebo. A crossover design was used to compare the results under a single dosing procedure with results obtained under a cumulative dosing procedure. Under the single dosing procedure, a dose of triazolam (0, 0.05, 0.15, or 0.35 mg/70 kg) or secobarbital (0, 25, 75, or 175 mg/70 kg) was administered 45 min before assessment. Determining each dose-effect curve thus required four sessions. Under the cumulative dosing procedure, four doses of triazolam (0, 0.05, 0.10, and 0.20 mg/70 kg) or secobarbital (0, 25, 50, and 100 mg/70 kg) were administered approximately 55 min apart, producing a complete dose-effect curve in one four-trial session. Regardless of procedure, triazolam and secobarbital produced discriminative stimulus and self-reported effects similar to previous single dosing studies in humans. Shifts to the right in cumulative dose-effect curves compared to single dose-effect curves occurred on several self-report measures. When qualitative stimulus functions rather than quantitative functions are of interest, application of cumulative dosing may increase efficiency in human drug discrimination.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1999 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1999.71-417