2 research outputs found
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Measuring inhibitory processes for alcohol-related attentional biases: introducing a novel attentional bias measure
Introduction: Attentional biases for alcohol related information (AB) have often been reported for heavy drinkers. These attentional biases have been found to have predictive value regarding relapse in abstaining alcoholics. Similarly impaired inhibitory processes have also been found to be associated with heavy drinkers. This paper describes a new experimental paradigm that can be utilised to investigate attentional bias towards alcohol-related visual stimuli, specifically the ability to inhibit the orientation of initial and sustained attention, towards peripherally appearing stimuli. In this way we hope to study a novel aspect of attentional biases and so how they relate to substance abuse.
Methods: We used a novel eye-tracking task which aims to measure inhibitory processes for AB. The experiment utilised a gaze contingency paradigm to measure the compulsion to process or attend to alcohol stimuli. 86 undergraduate participants were recruited (31 males; 55 females), aged 18–49 years (m=20.88;sd=4.52). A ‘break frequency’ variable was computed for each participant. This was number of times participants tried to look at peripheral stimuli. We argue that this variable is a direct measure of how distracting peripheral stimuli were.
Results: It was found that reported alcohol use was associated with the eye-tracking break frequency measure of inhibitory control. Thus, heavy drinking may be associated with decreased inhibitory control and increased attentional bias.
Conclusions: Results suggest that attentional bias is not just a process of stimuli becoming prioritised, but also stimuli becoming compulsory to attend and process
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The automatic nature of habitual goal-state activation in substance use; implications from a dyslexic population
Habitual goal-state activation may automatically elicit effects upon cognition, motivation, and emotion, through influence upon processes operating outside of awareness. For example, alcohol craving may be triggered by environmental cues. This experiment considered whether priming habitual goal-states would have similar effects for adult dyslexics and non-dyslexic controls. Dyslexia may be associated with automatisation deficits, which may affect habitual goal-state response. Dyslexics were compared to non-dyslexics on their reported alcohol cravings, following priming of one of two habitual goal-state conditions; studying or socialising. Within some of the exploratory analyses, a difference between dyslexics and non-dyslexics was demonstrated. However, the difference was not in the anticipated direction, as it was the dyslexics who were more affected by the primes. This suggests that dyslexics may be affected by primes differently to non-dyslexics. This research potentially helps understand the role that habitual goal-states play within substance use