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

Abstract

Background and Aims Research indicates that high consumers of alcohol exhibit attentional bias (AB) towards alcohol‐related cues, suggestive of a cognitive mechanism that might drive substance seeking. Many tasks that measure AB (e.g. visual probe, addiction Stroop), however, are limited by their reliance on non‐appetitive control cues, the serial presentation of stimuli and their poor internal reliability. The current study employed a visual conjunction search (VCS) task capable of presenting multiple alcoholic and non‐alcoholic appetitive cues simultaneously to assess whether social drinkers attend selectively to alcoholic stimuli. To assess the construct validity of this task, we examined whether alcohol consumption and related problems, subjective craving and drinking motives predict alcohol‐specific AB. Design and setting A VCS task was performed in a laboratory setting, which required participants to detect the presence of appetitive alcoholic (wine, beer) and non‐alcoholic (cola, lemonade) targets within arrays of matching and non‐matching distractors. Participants Data from 99 participants were assessed [meanage = 20.77, standard deviation (SD) = 2.98; 64 (65%) females], with 81.8% meeting the threshold for harmful alcohol consumption (meanAUDIT = 12.89, SD = 5.79). Measurements Self‐reports of alcohol consumption and related problems [Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT)], subjective craving (Alcohol Craving Questionnaire Short Form) and drinking motives (Drinking Motives Questionnaire Short Form) were obtained, and the VCS task measured response times for the correct detection of alcoholic and non‐alcoholic targets. Findings Participants were significantly quicker to detect alcoholic relative to non‐alcoholic appetitive targets (P < 0.001, dz = 0.41), which was predicted positively by AUDIT scores (P = 0.013, R2 = 0.06%). The VCS task achieved excellent reliability (α > 0.79), superior to other paradigms. Conclusions The visual conjunction search task appears to be a highly reliable method for assessing alcohol‐related attentional bias, and shows that heavy social drinkers prioritize alcoholic cues in their immediate environment.

Instrumental and Pavlovian Mechanisms in Alcohol Use Disorder

“…Dovetailing with results in clinical samples, cue reactivity studies with social drinkers have also reported increases in attentional bias [223,224], heart rate variability [225], and craving [226][227][228] in response to alcohol cues in heavy drinkers. Interestingly, Roy-Charland et al [223] observed that participants who consumed more alcohol performed more frequent saccades into and out of alcohol-related image parts, a behavior reminiscent of sign-tracking.…”

“…Translation of animal research to humans remains, however, challenging, with less clear-cut findings than animal studies due, at least in part, to heterogeneity in the paradigms used, employed measures of conditioning (implicit physiological, explicit self-report or neuronal), level of awareness about the conditioning procedure and modifying factors, such as comorbidities, AUD severity and duration, or context (e.g., enrollment in treatment programs or recent detoxification). This notwithstanding, alcohol cues have been extensively proven to induce attentional and psychophysiological changes and increase craving in individuals with AUD [202][203][204][206][207][208][209][210][211][212][213][214][215], as well as social drinkers [223][224][225][226][227][228]. However, in contrast to animal research, conditioning of alcohol cues in human studies has usually taken place outside of the experimenter's control and is thus subject to an indeterminate number of potential confounders.…”

El sesgo atencional en los trastornos relacionados con sustancias. Aspectos teóricos, evaluativos y de tratamiento

“…Los estudios sobre los SA señalan que el curso, el desarrollo y el mantenimiento de una conducta de consumo dependen de los estímulos a los que se exponen los consumidores y al tipo de procesamiento atencional (Sánchez-López et al, 2015). La captación preferencial de la atención del consumidor de señales críticas aumenta en importancia como resultado de un aprendizaje pavloviano (Robinson y Berridge, 1993) asociado al consumo, incluso desde condiciones no compulsivas en el consumo necesariamente; por ejemplo, en el consumo social empedernido de alcohol ya se detecta el aparecimiento del SA (Pennington et al, 2020). Es decir que las señales críticas se vuelven más destacadas a través del aprendizaje iniciado y sostenido por emparejamiento repetido con las sustancias como recompensa (Franken, 2007).…”

“…En consumidores de cannabis se detectó que cometen más errores de acierto frente a estímulos con información crítica que los no consumidores (Asmaro, Carolan y Liotti, 2014); también se encontró rendimiento de atención más pobre en consumidores versus no consumidores (Alcorn III, 2019). Lo mismo sucedió en consumidores de alcohol social empedernido, quienes mostraron una búsqueda visual de objetivos críticos más rápida que aquellos que no consumen o consumen poco (Pennington et al, 2020;Qureshi et al, 2019). Al parecer, estos hallazgos permiten identificar no solo la tendencia involuntaria en los consumidores de dirigir los recursos atencionales, sino el uso de procesos congnitivos automáticos e inconscientes subsecuentes que operan con este tipo de estímulos.…”

“…En aspectos específicos de los trastornos por consumo de sustancias también hay incidencia del SA en el deseo por consumir (craving) por ejemplo, el cual se incrementa tras la exposición de un consumidor a estímulos críticos (Pennington et al, 2020). Para ciertos autores la relación entre el SA y el craving se encuentra mediada tanto por el uso como por la habituación de la sustancia (Field, Munafo y Franken, 2009), aunque esta opinión no es compartida por todos (Franken, 2003).…”