O'Brien Claire, Harris Mike, Higgs Suzanne
School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK.
Hum Psychopharmacol. 2013 Sep;28(5):484-94. doi: 10.1002/hup.2337. Epub 2013 Aug 7.
The impairing effects of alcohol on attention are well documented and are thought to involve inhibitory mechanisms. We used ambiguous figures (Face-Vase and Necker cube) to test whether the intentional control mechanism is more vulnerable to the effects of alcohol than the automatic mechanism.
Participants were assigned to an alcohol (Study 1, N = 15; Study 2, N = 18), placebo (Study 1, N = 15; Study 2, N = 20) or control (Study 1 only, N = 10) group. The doses of alcohol were 0.8 g/kg for men and 0.75 g/kg for women. Participants were shown the Face-Vase and Necker cube figures and two variants of each, which were biased in varying degrees towards one interpretation. Study 1 assessed the automatic control mechanism by asking participants to report spontaneous reversals. Study 2 assessed the intentional control mechanism by asking participants to increase reversal rate.
In Study 1, reversal rate was similar for all groups, whereas in Study 2, the alcohol group reported more reversals than the control group, although this was true only for the biased versions of the Face-Vase illusion.
The effect of alcohol on reversal rate is observed only during intentional reversals of semantically meaningful stimuli and only when the stimulus is biased.
酒精对注意力的损害作用已有充分记录，且被认为涉及抑制机制。我们使用含混图形（人面-花瓶图和内克尔立方体图）来测试有意控制机制是否比自动机制更容易受到酒精的影响。
参与者被分配到酒精组（研究1，N = 15；研究2，N = 18）、安慰剂组（研究1，N = 15；研究2，N = 20）或对照组（仅研究1，N = 10）。男性的酒精剂量为0.8克/千克，女性为0.75克/千克。向参与者展示人面-花瓶图和内克尔立方体图以及它们各自的两个变体，这些变体在不同程度上偏向于一种解释。研究1通过要求参与者报告自发的图形反转来评估自动控制机制。研究2通过要求参与者提高反转率来评估有意控制机制。
在研究1中，所有组的反转率相似，而在研究2中，酒精组报告的反转次数比对照组多，不过这仅适用于人面-花瓶错觉的偏向版本。
仅在对语义有意义的刺激进行有意反转时，且仅当刺激存在偏向时，才会观察到酒精对反转率的影响。
