Discussion
COLD
To our knowledge, this is the first study to determine the effects of chronic escitalopram administration on a broad range of measures of ‘cold’, and ‘hot’ cognition, including reinforcement learning in healthy volunteers. In this double-blind placebo-controlled study, a relatively large group of healthy volunteers received either escitalopram or placebo for an average of 26 days. The novel and important finding was that escitalopram had the specific effect of reducing reinforcement sensitivity in two independent tests, but had no effects on other measures of ‘cold’ or ‘hot’ cognition.