Moderate acute alcohol intoxication increases visual motion repulsion

Abstract

Among the serious consequences of alcohol abuse is the reduced ability to process visual information. Diminished vision from excessive consumption of alcohol has been implicated in industrial, home, and automobile accidents. Alcohol is also generally recognized as an inhibitor in the brain by potentiating GABA-ergic transmission. In this study, we focused on visual motion processing and explored whether moderate alcohol intoxication induced changes in inhibitory mediated motion repulsion in a centersurround configuration. We conducted a double-blind, placebo-controlled, within-subjects study on the effect of alcohol on visual motion repulsion. Each subject underwent three experimental conditions (no alcohol, placebo and moderate alcohol) on separate days. The order of the placebo and moderate alcohol conditions was counterbalanced. The results showed that the effects of the surround context on the perception of the center motion direction were similar in both the sober (no alcohol) and placebo conditions. However, contextual modulations were significantly stronger during intoxication compared to both the sober and placebo conditions. These results demonstrate that moderate alcohol consumption is associated with altered neural function in visual cortical areas and that motion repulsion deficits might reflect the inhibitory effects of alcohol on the central nervous system. Acute alcohol consumption disturbs cognitive, attentional, motor, and perceptual functions in a dose-dependent manner. Negative effects occur with a small to moderate blood alcohol concentration (BAC) of approximately 0.4-0.5 mg/ml [1][2][3]

Dose‐dependent sensorimotor impairment in human ocular tracking after acute low‐dose alcohol administration

“…Indeed, our findings of increased pursuit latency and reduced precision in open-loop direction signals are consistent with the involvement of the middle temporal (MT) area (Maunsell & Van Essen, 1983;Albright, 1984;Felleman & Kaas, 1984;Lisberger & Movshon, 1999) and perhaps even earlier visual processing (Hubel, 1959;Churchland et al 2005;Gur et al 2005;Li et al 2008;Elstrott & Feller, 2009), given the role of these areas in the processing of direction signals. The fact that similar alcohol-related deficits have recently been found in perceptual direction thresholds and direction repulsion (Wang et al 2018), albeit at a higher BAC level of ∼0.07%, also suggests that early cortical motion processing pathways feeding into the posterior parietal cortex are affected by low-dose alcohol. Our findings also indicate that the well-known effects of alcohol on cerebellar and brainstem function (oculomotor output pathways), captured by deficits in eccentric gaze holding (Goding & Dobie, 1986;Whyte et al 2010;Romano et al 2017) and decreased peak saccadic velocity (Lehtinen et al 1979;Moser et al 1998;King & Byars, 2004;Fransson et al 2010;Roche & King, 2010) respectively, only become significant at higher BAC levels, at and above 0.035%, consistent with previous findings and with altered responses of Purkinje cells (Sinclair et al 1980;Franklin & Gruol, 1987;Idrus & Napper, 2012) and brainstem burst-neurons (Henn et al 1984).…”

“…The fact that similar alcohol‐related deficits have recently been found in perceptual direction thresholds and direction repulsion (Wang et al . 2018), albeit at a higher BAC level of ∼0.07%, also suggests that early cortical motion processing pathways feeding into the posterior parietal cortex are affected by low‐dose alcohol.…”

Moderate Alcohol Intake Changes Visual Perception by Enhancing V1 Inhibitory Surround Interactions

“…In the following, we emphasize the results of the second TI measures because they were obtained around the peak intoxication level (see Wang et al, 2018), where we expected the strongest Intoxication effect (Figures 1C,D). Then, we briefly present the results of the first and third measurements, which provide qualitatively similar conclusions.…”

“…The experimental design has been described in detail in our previous publication (Wang et al, 2018(Wang et al, , 2019. In brief, a total of 33 university students and staff (24 males, 20-30 years old, mean = 23.94 years) participated in our research.…”

Effects of Chronic Alcohol Use Disorder on the Visual Tilt Illusion

“…Particularly, the primary visual cortex (V1) is vulnerable to any noxious input, such as bisphenol A ( 5), methanol (6), or organic solvents (7). Alcohol consumption, sporadically or chronically, impairs visual function, as documented in animal research (8)(9)(10)(11), human imaging studies (12), and psychophysical measurements (13)(14)(15).…”