Psychological Medicine Laboratory, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brugmann Campus, CP403/21, Place Van Gehuchten, 4, 1020 Brussels, Belgium.
Drug Alcohol Depend. 2013 Mar 1;128(3):200-5. doi: 10.1016/j.drugalcdep.2012.08.021. Epub 2012 Sep 13.
Impulsivity is a hallmark of addictive behaviors. Addicts' weakened inhibition of irrelevant prepotent responses is commonly thought to explain this association. However, inhibition is not a unitary mechanism. This study investigated the efficiency of overcoming competition due to irrelevant responses (i.e., inhibition of a prepotent response) and overcoming competition in memory (i.e., resistance to proactive interference) in sober and recently detoxified alcohol-dependent individuals.
Three cognitive tasks assessing the inhibition of a prepotent response (Hayling task, anti-saccade task and Stroop task) and two tasks tapping into the capacity to resist proactive interference (cued recall, Brown-Peterson variant) were administered to 30 non-amnesic recently detoxified alcohol-dependent individuals and 30 matched healthy participants without alcohol dependency. In addition, possible confounds such as verbal updating in working memory was assessed.
Alcohol-dependent subjects performed worse than healthy participants on the three cognitive tasks assessing the inhibition of irrelevant prepotent responses but group performance was similar in the tasks assessing overcoming proactive interference in memory, updating of working memory and abstract reasoning.
These findings suggest that alcohol-dependence is mainly associated with impaired capacity to intentionally suppress irrelevant prepotent response information. Control of proactive interference from memory is preserved. Theoretical and clinical implications are discussed.
冲动是成瘾行为的一个特征。成瘾者对无关的优势反应的抑制减弱，通常被认为是这种关联的解释。然而，抑制不是一个单一的机制。本研究调查了在清醒和最近戒毒的酒精依赖个体中，由于无关反应（即抑制优势反应）和记忆中竞争（即抵抗前摄干扰）而克服竞争的效率。
对 30 名非健忘性最近戒毒的酒精依赖个体和 30 名无酒精依赖的匹配健康参与者进行了三项认知任务，评估抑制优势反应（Hayling 任务、反扫视任务和 Stroop 任务）和两项任务，评估抵抗前摄干扰的能力（提示回忆、Brown-Peterson 变体）。此外，还评估了工作记忆中的言语更新等可能的混杂因素。
酒精依赖组在三项评估抑制无关优势反应的认知任务中的表现均差于健康对照组，但在评估记忆中克服前摄干扰、工作记忆更新和抽象推理的任务中，两组的表现相似。
这些发现表明，酒精依赖主要与抑制无关优势反应信息的能力受损有关。对记忆中前摄干扰的控制得以保留。讨论了理论和临床意义。
