Beer? Over here! Examining attentional bias towards alcoholic and appetitive stimuli in a visual search eye-tracking task

Abstract

Rationale: Experimental tasks that demonstrate alcohol-related attentional bias typically expose participants to single-stimulus targets (e.g., addiction stroop, visual probe, anti-saccade task), which may not correspond fully with real-world contexts where alcoholic and non-alcoholic cues simultaneously compete for attention. Moreover, alcoholic stimuli are rarely matched to other appetitive non-alcoholic stimuli. Objectives: To address these limitations by utilising a conjunction search eye-tracking task and matched stimuli to examine alcohol-related attentional bias. Methods: Thirty social drinkers (Mage = 19.87, SD = 1.74) were asked to detect whether alcoholic (beer), non-alcoholic (water) or non-appetitive (detergent) targets were present or absent amongst a visual array of matching and non-matching distractors. Both behavioural response times and eye-movement dwell time were measured. Results: Social drinkers were significantly quicker to detect alcoholic and non-alcoholic appetitive targets relative to non-appetitive targets in an array of matching and mismatching distractors. Similarly, proportional dwell time was lower for both alcoholic and non-alcoholic appetitive distractors relative to non-appetitive distractors, suggesting that appetitive targets were relatively easier to detect. Conclusions: Social drinkers may exhibit generalised attentional bias towards alcoholic and non-alcoholic appetitive cues. This adds to emergent research suggesting that the mechanisms driving these individual’s attention towards alcoholic cues might ‘spill over’ to other appetitive cues, possibly due to associative learning.

Where's the wine? Heavy social drinkers show attentional bias towards alcohol in a visual conjunction search task

“…Building on the premise that repeat alcohol use may lead to enhanced signalling of alcohol-related cues [24], we hypothesized that alcohol users would exhibit AB towards alcoholic relative to non-alcoholic cues on the VCS task. Consistent with this, our sample of heavy social drinkers were quicker to detect the presence of alcoholic appetitive cues in an array of alcoholic and non-alcoholic distractors.…”

“…In recent years, however, both the visual probe and addiction Stroop task have come under increasing criticism for their low internal and test-retest reliability [21][22][23]. It has also been argued that the type of stimuli used in experimental paradigms may exaggerate the degree to which AB towards alcohol is shown [24]. Some studies, for example, assess alcohol-related AB by comparing responses between alcoholic appetitive stimuli and non-alcoholic nonappetitive control stimuli (e.g.…”

“…By only using non-appetitive control cues, it is impossible to dissociate between alcohol-specific AB or a more generalized response bias towards appetitive stimuli imbued with incentive value (see [1]). Indeed, a number of studies have demonstrated the importance of using appetitive non-alcoholic control stimuli to investigate alcoholrelated cognitions [14,24,[29][30][31][32]. Finally, experimental measures of AB towards alcoholic cues often present participants with (non-)alcoholic stimuli in a sequential manner that fails to capture an important aspect of real-world contexts: in naturalistic environments (e.g.…”

“…Given this high visual similarity, participants must use prior knowledge of target characteristics to maximize search efficiency [33][34][35]. This task may therefore offer an effective method for assessing alcohol-related AB and substance-related AB more generally; through repeated alcohol use, characteristic features of alcoholic cues may elicit enhanced signalling that leads to their prioritized detection among other stimuli in the environment [24]. This aligns with the incentive-sensitization theory of addiction [36][37][38], which proposes that, through neurophysiological changes, increased familiarity with substance-related cues heightens their incentive motivational properties [1,39,40].…”

“…Despite their potential utility we are aware of only one prior use of the VCS task to assess alcohol-related AB. In a previous experiment [24], we asked social drinkers to identify either an alcoholic (beer), appetitive non-alcoholic (water) or non-appetitive target (detergent) in an array of matching and mismatching distractors. Participants exhibited faster responses to both alcoholic and non-alcoholic relative to non-appetitive targets.…”