This project seeks to understand how drug abuse prevention programs have effects from a memory and implicit cognition perspective in theory and assessment and to begin to apply this perspective to the improvement and maintenance of prevention effects. This approach emphasizes cognitive processes that have received continued support in basic research on human memory, cognition and neuroscience but which have rarely been addressed in drug use prevention research. The essence of this approach is that one?s behavior at any one moment is governed primarily by the current pattern of activation in memory, and that activation is often primarily an implicit, or relatively spontaneous, process. To understand nonoptimal behavioral decisions, such as drug use, and its change, one must understand how patterns of activation in memory change spontaneously in response to different circumstances and how these processes are modified by drug experience and interventions. This approach assumes that group and individual differences may exist in how this implicit process operates. We propose to study critical and inter-related theoretical, assessment, and prevention issues from this approach in a particularly high-risk population: continuation high-school students. In Study 1 we propose to evaluate and refine the best assessments of associative memory processes and drug abuse, focusing on tests of associative memory in high-risk youth. In Study 2, we propose to evaluate effects of key curricula from a nationally recognized, prevention program on memory and implicit cognition processes on high risk youth. We apply the best assessments from the preceding study, but further differentiate among several assessments to see which are best at uncovering prevention effects on cognitive processes. We also propose to investigate other potential processes underlying curricula effects, including more traditional assessments. Other variables to be investigated are plausible moderators (effect-modifiers) of program effects on cognition (gender, acculturation change and traitbased factors), some of which are addressed as well by other center projects. Thus, Study 2 will evaluate a variety of alternative ways through which prevention programming may operate.
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