How does marijuana use affect our adaptive behavior?

According to a new study conducted by researchers at the University of Melbourne and published in Plos One magazinethe mere consumption is not the most important thing, but the age of the person when they started using cannabis.

The study shows that people who are long-time users from a young age are not very good at learning and correcting their mistakes.

Postdoc at the University of Sydney and lead author of the study, Gezelle Dali told ACM that people who started using marijuana earlier in life were less likely to work to correct their mistakes, even if they were aware reported the Canberra Times.

“A lot of work has shown that there is some influence of age at onset. So the sooner they start using cannabis, the more likely they are to show impaired performance,” Dali said. “That’s probably related to the fact that your brain is still developing when you’re young — it doesn’t stop developing until you’re about 25 years old.”

According to Dali, marijuana’s effects on the brain could lead to behavioral problems, which the study showed up as poorer error processing.

It’s important to note that the researchers didn’t detect a significant difference between marijuana and non-marijuana users, although it does show that the younger they started using weed, the worse their processing was. This means that overall cannabis use may not be directly associated with performance monitoring behavioral indices, but that other aspects of cannabis use may play an important role in our error processing.

“While error awareness and correction rates did not differ between groups, there was a significant effect of age of onset of use on error correction among cannabis users,” the researchers wrote. “In addition, the effect of error awareness was dependent on age of onset and frequency and harm associated with cannabis use.”

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