Julia Townshend

Attentional bias associated with alcohol cues: differences between heavy and occasional social drinkers

Abstract.Rationale: Previous research has shown an attentional bias toward drug-related stimuli in opiate addicts and toward emotionally threatening words in anxiety patients. Objective: The primary aim of this study was to investigate whether non-dependent heavy social drinkers would differ in their selective attention towards alcohol-related stimuli in comparison with a group of occasional social drinkers. Methods: Attentional bias was assessed using alcohol-related pictures and words in a dot probe detection task. Picture and word pairs were visually presented, followed by a dot probe that replaced one of the items. Attentional bias was determined from latencies in responding to the dot probe. Questionnaires were used to examine the relationships among attention, outcome expectancies after alcohol consumption, and personality traits. Higher-order executive function was also measured with two cognitive tasks, recognition memory and attentional shift. Results: The heavy social drinkers showed an attentional bias towards the alcohol-related stimuli when compared to the occasional social drinkers. The heavy social drinkers also scored more highly on expectancy factors of sociability and sexuality and lower on the personality traits of self-directedness and persistence. Conclusion: The results support cognitive theories of addictive behaviour in which the ability of drug-related stimuli to capture attention is suggested to play a part in drug dependence, craving and relapse.

Impairment in Cognitive Functions After Multiple Detoxifications in Alcoholic Inpatients

BACKGROUND Repeated experience of withdrawal from alcohol results in a kindling-like process leading to increased likelihood and severity of convulsions during detoxification. The aim of this study was to determine whether repeated withdrawals affect cognitive function. METHODS We investigated alcoholic patients undergoing detoxification in an inpatient setting, using tasks sensitive to dysfunction of prefrontal areas. The tasks applied were two maze tasks from the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, the color Stroop task, and the vigilance task for adults and the delay task from the Gordon Diagnostic System. Forty-two abstinent alcoholic patients who were no longer receiving pharmacotherapy for detoxification participated. RESULTS Compared to a group of forty-three social drinkers matched for age, sex, and verbal IQ, the alcoholic patients took more time to complete maze 1 and made more errors in both mazes. Alcoholics made more commission errors and gave fewer correct answers in the vigilance task. No differences were found in the color Stroop task between alcoholic patients and social drinkers. Patients with 2 or more detoxifications were more impaired in the maze 1, in the vigilance task and in the delay task than patients with a single, or no previous detoxification. When patients were reclassified on the basis of the total number of attempts at withdrawing from alcohol (including the medically supervised) only the deficit in the vigilance task was associated with the number of withdrawal attempts. The effects of medically supervised detoxifications on maze 1 and vigilance task were confounded with other factors related to the history of alcoholism, alcohol use, age of starting heavy drinking and years of problem drinking. CONCLUSIONS Repeated experience of withdrawal from alcohol is thus associated with impaired cognitive function although it appears that for some of these effects, other factors associated with the history of alcoholism might also be involved.

Data-driven recognition memory: A new technique and some data on age differences

In this study, we investigate the effect on recognition memory of having target and distractor stimuli consisting of different combinations of low-level elements (letters), relative to when targets and distractors consist of combinations of the same elements (nonoverlap and overlap conditions, respectively). It was found that recognition memory was enhanced in the nonoverlap condition, even though subjects reported being unaware of this experimental manipulation. This confirms the importance of perceptually driven processing in the implicit memory component of recognition memory. The extent to which this effect occurs is found to be age dependent, with elderly subjects benefiting more from having targets and distractors consisting of nonoverlapping elements. This is consistent with the notion that elderly subjects show less reliance on item-specific/contextual detail to support recognition memory.