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Monday, October 26, 2009

Reduced attentional blink for alcohol-related stimuli in heavy social drinkers

Researchers have used various paradigms to show that attentional biases for substance-related stimuli are an important feature of addictive behaviors (e.g. Field & Cox, 2008). However, it is not clear whether these attentional biases occur at the level of encoding or at later postattentive processing stages.

We examined attentional bias at the level of encoding with the attentional blink (AB) paradigm (Raymond et al., 1992) in a sample of non-clinical heavy and light drinking students.

Our results show a diminished AB effect for alcohol-related words compared to soft drink-related words among heavy drinkers. The AB was equally strong for alcohol-related and soft drink-related words among light drinkers.

This suggests that alcohol related information is processed relatively more efficiently in the former group. Even though these results are promising, our study shows that the internal consistency of the AB can be improved.

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