Reduced attentional capture by reward following an acute dose of alcohol
- PDF / 964,143 Bytes
- 15 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 32 Downloads / 194 Views
ORIGINAL INVESTIGATION
Reduced attentional capture by reward following an acute dose of alcohol Poppy Watson 1
&
Daniel Pearson 1,2 & Mike E. Le Pelley 1
Received: 18 May 2020 / Accepted: 10 August 2020 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Rationale Previous research has shown that physically salient and reward-related distractors can automatically capture attention and eye gaze in a visual search task, even though participants are motivated to ignore these stimuli. Objectives To examine whether an acute, low dose of alcohol would influence involuntary attentional capture by stimuli signalling reward. Methods Participants were assigned to the alcohol or placebo group before completing a visual search task. Successful identification of the target earned either a low or high monetary reward but this reward was omitted if any eye gaze was registered on the reward-signalling distractor. Results Participants who had consumed alcohol were significantly less likely than those in the placebo condition to have their attention captured by a distractor stimulus that signalled the availability of high reward. Analysis of saccade latencies suggested that this difference reflected a reduction in the likelihood of impulsive eye movements following alcohol. Conclusions Our findings suggest that alcohol intoxication reduces the capacity to attend to information in the environment that is not directly relevant to the task at hand. In the current task, this led to a performance benefit under alcohol, but in situations that require rapid responding to salient events, the effect on behaviour would be deleterious. Keywords Attentional capture . Cognitive control . Alcohol dose . Reward
Introduction Alcohol is one of the most widely used drugs globally and its effects on mood and emotion are a commonly cited motivation for drinking (Park 2004). Perhaps surprisingly then, an influential theory of alcohol’s stress-reducing and social effects asserts that alcohol does not have direct effects on emotion but that, instead, alcohol affects attention and information processing, which in turn influences emotions and behaviour Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s00213-020-05641-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Poppy Watson [email protected] 1
School of Psychology, UNSW Sydney, Sydney NSW 2052 Australia
2
Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, London UK
(Josephs and Steele 1990; Steele and Josephs 1990). According to this theory, alcohol reduces attentional capacity and thus restricts attention to the most salient and immediate cues, at the expense of other information in the environment. The implication is that intoxicated individuals will be less likely to allocate attention to competing information—an “inoculating” effect that might be beneficial in some contexts (when task-irrelevant information could cause distraction) but detrimental in others where situations can c
Data Loading...
