Electrophysiological evidence of alcohol-related attentional bias in social drinkers low in alcohol sensitivity.

Low sensitivity (LS) to the acute effects of alcohol is a known risk-factor for alcoholism. However, little is known concerning potential information-processing routes by which this risk factor might contribute to increased drinking. We tested the hypothesis that LS participants would show biased attention to alcohol cues, compared to their high-sensitivity (HS) counterparts. Participants performed a task in which alcoholic and nonalcoholic beverage cues were presented bilaterally followed by a target that required categorization by color. Response times were faster for targets appearing in alcohol-cued than nonalcohol-cued locations for LS but not for HS participants. Event-related potential markers of early attention orienting (P1 amplitude) and subsequent attention reorienting (ipsilateral invalid negativity [IIN] amplitude) indicated preferential selective attention to alcohol-cued locations among LS individuals. Controlling for recent drinking and family history of alcoholism did not affect these patterns, except that among HS participants relatively heavy recent drinking was associated with difficulty reorienting attention away from alcohol-cued locations. These findings suggest a potential information-processing bias through which low sensitivity could lead to heavy alcohol involvement

Multiple Forms of Stimulus Representation in Visual Working Memory

98 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2007.These experiments demonstrated the existence of multiple levels of stimulus representation and their interactive nature. They also showed that the ERL method can be used to reveal different forms of stimulus representation across different time windows.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD

P2-2: Effects of Color Preview History on Inter-Trial Inhibition of Selective Attention

The distractor previewing effect (DPE) refers to the phenomenon that search times for target colors that were previewed (target preview or TP) in a preceding target-absent display (TAD) are slower than for distractor colors that were previewed (distractor preview, DP) in the TAD. The DPE is explained as attentional inhibition for the features associated with TADs. We investigated history effects of this inter-trial inhibition by manipulating color preview history and examined the DPE using RT and the N2pc (an electrophysiological index of attention allocation). The TAD, ranging from 0 to 2, was followed by a target-present display in which participants responded to the shape of a color-oddball. For the 2TADs, a single color (red or green) was repeated twice or the two colors were alternated, resulting in TTP, DDP, TDP, and DTP conditions depending on which color (target or distractor) in the search display was previewed. The 1TADs resulted in the TP and the DP, and the 0TADs comprised immediate search trials. RTs showed: (a) the TP was slower than the DP; (b) the TTP and DDP were slowest and fastest, respectively, and between these the DTP was slower than the TDP; (c) the TTP-DDP difference doubled the TP-DP difference due to the RT increase in the TTP. The conditions with slower RTs corresponded with late onsets and smaller amplitudes in the N2pc. These results suggest that effects of color preview history are cumulative with weight on more recent events and support the idea of inter-trial inhibition of target selection

Examples of trial sequences in the pretest and posttest (a), the filtering training (b), and the consolidation training (c).

<p>The arrows indicate which memory array out of the two sides had to be remembered. The color-filled squares represented the target items to be remembered, and the color-outlined squares the distractor items to be ignored (b). The task was to judge whether the memory array and the test array were the same or different. (b) and (c) show examples of correct answers, same and different, respectively. Finally, the SOA represents the stimulus onset asynchrony, which includes the duration of the memory array.</p

Correlation between training gains and threshold improvements across the training sessions.

<p>Tie point 1 (represented by the vertical dotted line) indicates the point at which the threshold of the first session was the same as that of the last session, showing no learning from the training. The error bars indicate the standard error of the mean.</p

Memory capacity <i>H</i> in the five set sizes across the three groups in the pretest and posttest.

<p>Memory capacity <i>H</i> in the five set sizes across the three groups in the pretest and posttest.</p