Reduced attentional capture by reward following an acute dose of alcohol

Rationale:Previous research has shown that physically-salient and reward-related distractors can automatically capture attention and eye-gaze in a visual search task, even though participants are motivated to ignore these stimuli. Objectives:To examine whether an acute, low dose of alcohol would influence involuntary attentional capture by stimuli signalling reward.Methods:Participants were assigned to the alcohol or placebo group before completing a visual-search task. Successful identification of the target earned either a low or high monetary reward but this reward was omitted if any eye gaze was registered on the reward-signalling distractor. Results:Participants who had consumed alcohol were significantly less likely than those in the placebo condition to have their attention captured by a distractor stimulus that signalled the availability of high reward. Analysis of saccade latencies suggested that this difference reflected a reduction in the likelihood of impulsive eye-movements following alcohol.Conclusions:Our findings suggest that alcohol intoxication reduces the capacity to attend to information in the environment that is not directly relevant to the task at hand, consistent with alcohol myopia theory. In the current task this led to a performance benefit under alcohol, but in situations that require rapid responding to salient events the effect on behaviour would be deleterious.

Alcohol myopia and the distracting effects of hair in face recognition

Background: According to alcohol myopia theory, alcohol reduces cognitive resources and restricts the drinker’s attention to only the more prominent aspects of a visual scene. As human hairstyles are often salient and serve as important facial recognition cues, we consider whether alcohol restricts attention to this region of faces upon initial viewing. Aims: Participants with higher breath alcohol concentrations just prior to encoding a series of unfamiliar faces were expected to be poorer than more sober counterparts at recognising the internal but not external features of those faces at test. Methods: Drinkers in a nearby bar ( n=76) were breathalysed and then shown a sequence of 21 full face photos. After a filled five-minute retention interval they completed a facial recognition task requiring them to identify the full, internal or external region of each of these among a sequence of 21 previously unseen (part or whole) faces. Results: As predicted, higher breath concentrations were associated with poorer discrimination of internal but not external face regions. Conclusions: Our findings suggest that alcohol restricts unfamiliar face encoding by narrowing the scope of attention to the exterior region of unfamiliar faces. This has important implications for drunk eyewitness accuracy, though further investigation is needed to see if the effect is mediated by gender, hair length and face feature distinctiveness.

Testing Alcohol Myopia Theory: Examining the Effects of Alcohol Intoxication on Simultaneous Central and Peripheral Attention

The effect of alcohol intoxication on central and peripheral attention was examined as a test of Alcohol Myopia Theory (AMT). Previous research has supported AMT in the context of visual attention, but few studies have examined the effects of alcohol intoxication on central and peripheral attention. The study followed a 2 (alcohol treatment) × 2 (array size) × 2 (task type) mixed design. Forty-one participants (placebo or intoxicated) viewed an array of four or six colored circles, while simultaneously counting the flashes of a centrally presented fixation cross. Participants were instructed to prioritize flash counting accuracy. The subsequently presented colored probe matched the cued peripheral stimulus on 50% of trials. Flash counting and probe identification accuracy were recorded. There was a significant main effect of alcohol treatment on accuracy scores, as well as an alcohol treatment by task type interaction. Accuracy scores for the central flash counting task did not differ between treatment groups, but scores for peripheral probe identification were lower in the alcohol group. As predicted by AMT, alcohol impairment was greater for peripheral probe detection than for the central and prioritized flash counting task. The findings support the notion that alcohol intoxication narrows attentional focus to the central aspects of a task.