Comparison of alcohol impairment of behavioral and attentional inhibition

Abstract

Background Despite the wealth of studies demonstrating the impairing effects of alcohol on behavioral inhibition, less is known regarding effects of the drug on attentional inhibition (i.e., the ability to ignore distracting stimuli in the environment in order to focus attention on relevant information). The current study examined alcohol impairment of both behavioral and attentional inhibition, as well as potential associations between the two mechanisms of inhibitory control. Methods Men (n = 27) and women (n = 21) performed a measure of behavioral inhibition (cued go/no-go task) and a measure of attentional inhibition (delayed ocular return task) following three doses of alcohol: 0.65 g/kg, 0.45 g/kg, and 0.0 g/kg (placebo). Results Alcohol impaired both behavioral and attentional inhibition relative to placebo; however, correlational analyses revealed no associations between measures of behavioral and attentional inhibition following any dose. Additionally, men committed more inhibitory failures on the behavioral inhibition task, whereas women committed more inhibitory failures on the attentional inhibition task. Conclusions These findings suggest that behavioral and attentional inhibition are equally sensitive to the impairing effects of alcohol, yet represent distinct components of inhibitory control. Additionally, the observed gender differences in control of behavior and attention could have important implications regarding negative consequences associated with alcohol-induced disinhibition in men and women.

The influence of groups and alcohol consumption on individual risk-taking

“…Impulsive, or disinhibited, individuals share a number of characteristics, whereby they appear to make quick decisions, carry out unplanned behaviours (Fernie et al, 2010;Weafer & Fillmore, 2012b) and have difficultly inhibiting prepotent responses, diminishing behavioural constraint (Giancola et al, 2010;Leeman et al, 2009). Assessing these characteristics, disinhibition is typically tested in a laboratory using behavioural tasks such as the go/no-go task (Marczinski & Fillmore, 2003), where reaction time and frequency of failed attempts to inhibit behaviour (such as a button pressing) are measured.…”

“…In support of chronic alcohol consumption effects on risky behaviour, persistent heavy alcohol use appears to be associated with changes in brain structures linked to behavioural control, such as frontal lobe functioning alternations and neurodegeneration (Crews & Boettiger, 2009). The latter (acute consumption) is largely assessed using alcohol administration procedures which often find that intoxicated individuals (opposed to control) demonstrate impaired behaviour inhibition (Adams, Ataya, Attwood, & Munafò, 2013;Weafer & Fillmore, 2012b). …”

Impairment of manual but not saccadic response inhibition following acute alcohol intoxication

“…For example, more studies report a lack of alcohol effect or even a positive alcohol effect on anti-saccade task performance (Blekher et al, 2002;Khan et al, 2003;Vassallo et al, 2002;Vorstius et al, 2008) than report an impairment (Crevits et al, 2000;Marinkovic et al, 2013). Nonetheless, studies considering the effect of alcohol on the delayed ocular response task find significant effects of alcohol on premature saccades (e.g., Abroms et al, 2006;Weafer and Fillmore, 2012). Given the correlation between hand and eye SSRT and overlap of a common functional network observed using fMRI (Leung and Cai, 2007) it was anticipated that alcohol would affect saccadic SSRT.…”

“…Similarly, in a saccade interference task in which saccade latency is slowed by large interfering stimuli, alcohol produced no significant effect (healthy participants, Abroms et al, 2006). In a third task − the delayed ocular return task − moderate doses of alcohol (0.45 g/ kg and 0.65 g/kg) in healthy participants did increase the number of premature saccades (a failure of inhibition; Abroms et al, 2006;Weafer and Fillmore, 2012), but this impairment did not correlate with the impairment to their manual task (cued go/no-go), indicating independent systems (Weafer and Fillmore, 2012). However, as these authors pointed out, these eye movement tasks are not directly comparable to the commonly used manual tasks (go/no-go and stop signal) -eye movement versions of these tasks have not been studied with alcohol.…”

“…Most reports of alcohol disrupting inhibitory control in healthy volunteers have employed the go/no-go task (Mulvihill et al, 1997;Weafer and Fillmore, 2008), cued go/no-go task (Marczinski and Fillmore, 2003;Weafer and Fillmore, 2012) and the stop signal reaction time task (Caswell et al, 2013;de Wit et al, 2000;Dougherty et al, 2008;Fillmore and Vogel-Sprott, 1999;Gan et al, 2014;Loeber and Duka, 2009;McCarthy et al, 2012;Nikolaou et al, 2013;Ramaekers and Kuypers, 2006;Reynolds et al, 2006). Although there exist reports where alcohol had no significant effect Duka, 2008, 2007), taken together, these studies suggest that even a relatively small dose of alcohol (e.g., 0.45 g/kg) normally increases the number of commission errors in the go/no-go task or slows the manual stop signal reaction time (SSRT) in the stop signal task.…”