Attentional re‐training decreases attentional bias in heavy drinkers without generalization

Smith

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

et al. 2016

. (2015) 'Altering attentional control settings causes persistent biases of visual attention.', The quarterly journal of experimental psychology., 69 (1). pp. 129-149.Further information on publisher's website:https://doi.org/10. 1080/17470218.2015.1031144 Publisher's copyright statement:This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor Francis in the quarterly journal of experimental psychology. on 13/05/2015 available online:http://www.tandfonline.com/10. 1080/17470218.2015.1031144 Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-pro t purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. arbitrary stimulus in healthy participants. Subjects were biased towards the colour green by an information sheet. Attentional bias was assessed using a change detection task. After an interval of either 1 or 2 weeks participants were then either re-tested on the same change detection task, tested on a different change detection task where colour was irrelevant, or were biased towards an alternative colour. One experiment included trials in which the distracter stimuli (but never the target stimuli) were green. The key finding was that green stimuli in the second task attracted attention, despite this impairing task performance. Furthermore, inducing a second attentional bias did not override the initial bias toward green objects. The attentional bias also persisted for at least two weeks. It is argued that this persistent attentional bias is mediated by a chronic change to participants attentional control settings, which is aided by long-term representations involving contextual cuing. We speculate that similar changes to attentional control settings and continuous cuing may relate to attentional biases observed in psychopathologies. Targeting these biases may be a productive approach to treatment.Attentional Bias Development Although there has been great debate on how visual stimuli are selected for further processing (Theeuwes, 1991;1992;Belopolsky & Theeuwes, 2010;Folk et al., 1992;Bacon & Egeth, 1994), one generally accepted proposal is that observers can activate one of two distinctive attentional sets:Attentional Bias Development 5Singleton Detection Mode or Feature Search Mode (Bacon & Egeth, 1994; Leber & Egeth, 2006b).Singleton Detection Mode is based purely on the physical salience of an item, allowing the most salient item in a visual field -such as a feature singleton (a red item amongst greyscale items) -to capture attention. Alternatively, Feature Search Mode relies on a defining target feature -such as a particular colour -and is a much narrower attentional se...

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Altering attentional control settings causes persistent biases of visual attention

Smith

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

et al. 2016

“…Two studies reported that an experimental increase in attentional bias led to increased subjective craving (Field and Eastwood 2005; Field et al 2007a) and drinking (Field and Eastwood 2005). However, an experimental decrease in attentional bias has not been found to decrease craving or drinking behavior (Field et al 2007a;Schoenmakers et al 2007). In sum, there is ample evidence for the interrelation of attentional bias, approach bias, and craving, but it is not clear under which conditions these relations are manifested.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of a low dose of alcohol on cognitive biases and craving in heavy drinkers

2007

Self Cite

Rationale-Heavy alcohol drinking increases the incentive salience of alcohol-related cues. This leads to increased appetitive motivation to drink alcohol as measured by subjective craving and cognitive biases such as attentional bias and approach bias. Although these measures relate to the same construct, correlations between these variables are often very low. Alcohol consumption might not only increase different aspects of appetitive motivation, but also correlations between those aspects.Objectives-To investigate the effect of a low alcohol dose on changes in various measures of appetitive motivation.Materials and methods-Twenty-three heavy social drinkers were tested in 2 sessions, once after receiving an alcohol prime dose and once after receiving a placebo drink. After drink administration, attentional bias was measured with a visual-probe task using concurrent eye movement monitoring. Furthermore, we measured the approach bias with a stimulus response compatibility task and subjective craving with the Desires for Alcohol Questionnaire.Results-After the alcohol prime dose, participants had higher levels of craving and more pronounced attentional bias (faster reaction times to probes that replaced alcohol rather than control pictures, increased maintenance of gaze on alcohol pictures, and a higher percentage of first eye movements directed toward alcohol pictures). Approach bias was not influenced by the alcohol prime dose. The correlation between attentional bias and approach bias was significantly higher after the alcohol than after the placebo drink.Conclusions-A low alcohol dose increased most measures of appetitive motivation for alcohol and increased the interrelation between cognitive measures of this construct. KeywordsAttentional bias; Approach bias; Eye movements; Craving; Alcohol prime dose © Springer-Verlag 2007 Correspondence to: Tim Schoenmakers. According to the incentive sensitization theory (Robinson and Berridge 1993), after a substantive period of heavy alcohol drinking, cues related to drinking (e.g., beer glasses, wine bottles, a pub) become associated with the effects of alcohol by a conditioning process. During this process, these cues acquire similar appetitive motivational characteristics as alcohol. As a consequence, they become more salient and receive a disproportionate amount of attention (attentional bias). Once attention is focused on the cues, other conditioned appetitive motivational responses are triggered, such as craving for the drug and a tendency to have a dominant approach response toward alcohol-related cues, i.e., approach bias. Only heavy drinkers and not light drinkers have been found to show attentional bias (e.g Townshend and Duka 2001) and approach bias (Field et al. 2007b). In this study, we examine the effect of a low alcohol dose on measures of appetitive motivation to use alcohol. Europe PMC Funders GroupWhereas subjective craving is measured with self-report questionnaires, cognitive biases such as attentional bias and approach bias are measured w...

Trends Psychiatry Psychother.

“…10 In the other study, AB in the avoid group decreased when compared with the control group at SOA 500 ms, but not at 200 ms, and generalized to new stimuli, but did not correlate with craving. 53 The latter had the largest number of trials in this category, and although the AB did not correlate with craving, the participants in the avoid group took longer to relapse and were discharged earlier than those in the control group.…”

Section: Anxietymentioning

confidence: 73%

“…51 In contrast, of the five studies that compared avoid (to drug) and control groups, only one found no differences between groups. 52 The two studies about alcohol use 10,53 found differences between groups in the post-test. In one of all participants showed an attentional bias toward unhealthy food cues at baseline.…”

Section: Drug Addictionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…62,65 Similar encouraging results were found in two other recent studies. 63,64 In the first, groups were trained either to attend to healthy food or to attend to unhealthy food, and 33 Avoid (-)/control Yes No Amir et al 6 Avoid (-)/control Yes Yes Hazen et al 26 Avoid (-)/control Yes Yes Heeren et al 27 Avoid (-)/control Yes Yes See et al 28 Avoid (-)/control Yes Yes Heeren et al 29 Avoid (-)/control Yes No MacLeod et al 7 Avoid (-)/attend (+) Yes Yes Browning et al 19 Avoid (-)/attend (+) Yes Yes MacLeod et al 34 Avoid (-)/attend (+) Yes Yes Van Bockstaele et al 35 Avoid (-)/attend (+) Yes No Van Bockstaele et al 36 Avoid (-)/attend (+) Yes No Eldar et al 37 Avoid (-)/attend (+) Partly No O'Toole et al 38 Avoid (-)/attend (+) Partly No Heeren et al 39 Attend (-)/control Yes Yes Krebs et al 40 Attend (-)/control Yes Yes Hayes et al 41 Attend (+)/control Yes Yes Li et al 42 Attend (+)/control Yes Yes Taylor et al 43 Attend (+)/control Yes Yes Wadlinger et al 44 Attend (+)/control Yes Yes Cowart et al 46 Avoid (-) Not applicable Not applicable Amir et al 45 Avoid (-) Yes Yes Brosan et al 47 Avoid (-) Yes Yes Heeren et al 48 Avoid (-)/attend (+)/control Yes Yes Klumpp et al 49 Avoid (-)/attend (+)/control No No Boettcher et al 50 Attend ( 51 Avoid (-)/attend (+) Yes Yes Schoenmakers et al 10 Avoid (-)/control Yes No Schoenmakers et al 53 Avoid (-)/control Yes Partly Kerst et al 54 Avoid (-)/control Yes Partly Lopes et al 55 Avoid (-)/control Yes No McHugh et al 52 Avoid (-)/control No No Fie...…”

Section: Eating Behaviormentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Attentional bias modification based on visual probe task: methodological issues, results and clinical relevance

Lopes

Viacava

Bizarro

2015

Introduction: Attentional bias, the tendency that a person has to drive or maintain attention to a specific class of stimuli, may play an important role in the etiology and persistence of mental disorders. Attentional bias modification has been studied as a form of additional treatment related to automatic processing. Objectives: This systematic literature review compared and discussed methods, evidence of success and potential clinical applications of studies about attentional bias modification (ABM) using a visual probe task. Methods: The Web of Knowledge, PubMed and PsycInfo were searched using the keywords attentional bias modification, attentional bias manipulation and attentional bias training. We selected empirical studies about ABM training using a visual probe task written in English and published between 2002 and 2014. Results: Fifty-seven studies met inclusion criteria. Most (78%) succeeded in training attention in the predicted direction, and in 71% results were generalized to other measures correlated with the symptoms. Conclusions: ABM has potential clinical utility, but to standardize methods and maximize applicability, future studies should include clinical samples and be based on findings of studies about its effectiveness.