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Attentional bias to alcohol is a well-documented effect whereby drinkers allocate greater visual attention toward alcohol-related stimuli rather than nonappetitive, neutral stimuli. Some recent research has shown that acute administration of alcohol temporarily reduces attentional bias to alcohol cues, possibly because alcohol consumption satiates the motivation to drink. However, the specificity of this effect has not been tested, and so it is unclear whether reduced attentional bias following alcohol is specific to alcohol-related stimuli or whether attention to other appetitive stimuli is also reduced (e.g., food). This study tested the degree to which acute alcohol administration selectively reduced attentional bias to alcohol-related but not to food-related cues in a group of 23 healthy young adults who reported consuming alcohol roughly twice per week. Attentional bias to alcohol-related and food-related cues was tested using visual dot probe tasks following 2 active doses of alcohol, .30 g/kg and .65 g/kg, and a placebo. Results showed that attentional bias, measured as fixation time to stimuli on the visual probe tasks, to alcohol cues declined in a dose-dependent manner, whereas attentional bias to food cues was unaffected by the doses. The evidence suggests that alcohol consumption specifically reduces attentional bias to alcohol-related stimuli whereas bias to other appetitive stimuli remains intact. Evidence that alcohol consumption reduces attentional bias specifically to alcohol cues lends further credibility to the satiation theory and to the utility of attentional bias as an indicator of acute and transient changes in an individual's motivation to use alcohol. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

The phenomenon of attentional bias to alcohol, where drinkers demonstrate a preference in allocating visual attention towards alcohol-related stimuli rather than neutral stimuli, is well-established. Studies detecting this phenomenon typically utilize computer-administered stimulus presentation tasks such as the visual dot probe task. Despite their frequency of use, these tasks do not represent the ways in which individuals typically encounter alcohol outside of the laboratory. Typical environments where alcohol is present allow individuals to move about freely and encounter alcohol while also being exposed to many other stimuli. This dissertation sought to implement a novel approach to assessing attentional bias in vivo, and identify how alcohol consumption might influence such in vivo attentional bias. This two-study dissertation utilized an in vivo task where participants looked freely around a room representing a recreational setting containing numerous objects while portable eye-tracking glasses monitored what an individual looked at and for how long. Target items of alcohol and neutral beverages were placed throughout the environment and fixation time spent on these objects was recorded. The first study of this dissertation examined attentional bias to alcohol-related objects across two identical testing sessions to understand the impact of novelty on allocation of in vivo attention. The second study tested individuals using the same in vivo assessment following a 0.30 g/kg dose of alcohol, a 0.65 g/kg dose of alcohol and a placebo. Participants also completed the visual dot probe task in order to measure and compare their attentional bias in a more traditionally implemented task to the novel in vivo approach. Results from the first study indicate that as the novelty of stimuli begins to wane and habituation to neutral stimuli occurs, attentional bias to alcohol-related objects emerges. This attentional bias was shown to be related to drinking habits, where heavier drinkers demonstrated increased attentional bias. The second study in this research found no discernible effect of alcohol consumption on in vivo attentional bias, but did identify a satiating effect of consumption on bias as measured by the visual dot probe task. Additional visual dot probe findings suggest the specificity of the effect of alcohol consumption on attentional bias. Together, these findings help inform whether there is benefit in utilizing an ecological model of measuring attentional bias and how the phenomenon might be measured in laboratory settings in the future. Copyright: © Ramey Gamal Monem 2018

Attentional bias to alcohol-related stimuli is believed to be an important contributor to the development and maintenance of drug abuse. There is a considerable body of research examining attentional bias, much of which has typically utilized image-display tasks as a means to assess the phenomenon. Little, however, is known about the nature of this bias in an individual's natural environment. The current study sought to implement a novel approach to assessing attentional bias in vivo. Participants wore portable eye-tracking glasses that recorded video from their point of view and measured fixation time to objects they observed. They entered a room that was designed to represent a recreational setting in which both alcohol- and nonalcoholic-neutral beverages were placed along with other stimuli. In two different testing sessions, participants were free to visually explore the room. Participants showed similar fixation times to alcohol and neutral beverages during Session 1. Attentional bias to alcoholic beverages was observed in Session 2 because fixation time decreased to neutral but not to alcoholic beverages. The magnitude of attentional bias was positively associated with drinking habits, with heavier drinkers demonstrating a higher degree of bias to alcohol. These findings provide an ecological model of how attentional bias can develop as the net result of attention being sustained to alcoholic stimuli while diminishing to other stimuli over time. (PsycINFO Database Record

Background Alcohol impairs drinkers' abilities to inhibit inappropriate responses. Certain stimulus conditions have been shown to facilitate behavioral control. Under conditions where individuals are presented with multiple inhibitory signals, the speed and consistency with which they are able to inhibit a response is improved. Recent research has shown that multisensory signals might protect against the disruptive effects of alcohol on mechanisms of behavioral control. This study examined whether multisensory stop signals can be used to improve inhibitory control, possibly by speeding attentional shifts toward inhibitory “stop” signals in the environment. Methods Twenty adult social drinkers performed a modified cued go/no-go task that measured the ability to inhibit prepotent responses following 0.64 g/kg alcohol and placebo. Response targets were presented as unimodal (visual) and as multisensory (visual + aural) stimuli. Results Results showed that during unimodal response target trials, participants made more inhibitory failures under 0.64 g/kg alcohol compared to placebo. During multisensory trials, however, there was no significant effect of alcohol on inhibitory control. Conclusions These findings identify multisensory inhibitory signals as a potentially important environmental factor that can reduce the degree to which alcohol disinhibits behavior possibly by intersensory co-activation between the visual and auditory pathways.

Studies of visual attention find that drinkers spend more time attending to images of alcohol-related stimuli compared to neutral images. It is believed that this attentional bias contributes to the maintenance of alcohol use. However, no research has examined the possibility that this bias of visual attention might actually impede the functioning of other modalities, such as the processing of accompanying auditory stimuli. This study aimed to determine if alcohol-related images engender greater sensory dominance than neutral images, such that processing accompanying information from another modality (audition) would be impeded. Drinkers who had an attentional bias to alcohol-related images performed a multisensory perception task that measured how alcohol-related versus neutral visual images affected their ability to detect and respond to simultaneously presented auditory signals. In accord with the hypothesis, compared with neutral images, the presentation of alcohol-related images impaired the ability to detect and respond to auditory signals. Increased dominance of the visual modality was demonstrated by more bimodal targets being misclassified as visual-only targets in the alcohol target condition compared with that of the neutral. Findings suggest that increased processing of alcohol-related stimuli may impede an individual's ability to encode and interpret information obtained from other sensory modalities.