Alcohol Use and Attention (2010)
Undergraduates: Ryan Wade, none none none
Faculty Advisor: Charlotte Boettiger
Department: Psychology & Neuroscience
The purpose of this study is to measure the degree to which alcohol use history predicts attentional biases towards alcohol-related visual stimuli. Participants were recruited into three groups: low social drinkers, high social drinkers, and sober alcoholics. We predicted that relative to light drinkers, sober alcoholics and heavy drinkers would show greater speed and accuracy in detecting visual targets cued by alcohol-related visual stimuli. Behavioral assessments were conducted via three computer tasks: a spatial cuing, attentional blink, and an affect misattribution task. For the cuing task, participants were instructed to identify the location of a target following two images that flashed on the screen, which were either alcohol-related or neutral. For the attentional blink task, participants saw a rapid stream of images and indicated whether or not they noticed two targets within the stream. For the misattribution task, participants viewed alcohol or neutral-related images, followed by a Chinese character, and were instructed to indicate whether or not they found the character to be pleasant. We found that heavy drinkers responded faster overall to alcohol and neutral cues, light drinkers had a slightly more positive bias towards alcohol cues, higher risk participants showed a significant bias towards alcohol cues at the latest lag of the attentional blink task, and that lower risk participants found alcohol cues to be less pleasant relative to higher risk participants.