The dopamine agonist pramipexole has recently been suggested as a potential novel
antidepressant drug. While preliminary clinical data hint at its efficacy in treating
depressive symptoms, our current understanding of its impact on neurocognitive processes is
relatively limited. This is in part because mechanistic studies have largely focused on the
effects of single-dose treatments. However, such acute administration of dopaminergic drugs
likely has different cognitive effects than the more prolonged administration that is used
clinically. This study therefore aims to explore and characterise the neurocognitive effects
of more prolonged pramipexole treatment. Forty healthy volunteers will be randomly allocated
to 12 to 15 days of treatment with either pramipexole or placebo. Study participants as well
as researchers will be blinded as to which treatment is used. Before and after treatment all
participants will perform a set of psychological tasks and questionnaires evaluating
reward-based learning, emotional information processing, motivational vigour and subjective
experience. Furthermore, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) will be used to compare
neural activity during emotion and reward processing between the two treatment groups. We
hypothesises that pramipexole might enhance reward sensitivity, motivational vigour, and
pleasure experience and could induce positive biases in emotional information processing.