School of Psychology, University of Sunderland, Shackleton House, City Campus, Chester Road, Sunderland, SR1 3SD, UK.
Psychology Department, Upper Mountjoy, South Road, Durham University, DH1, 3LE, Durham, UK.
Psychopharmacology (Berl). 2018 Oct;235(10):2967-2978. doi: 10.1007/s00213-018-4987-4. Epub 2018 Aug 18.
It is well established that alcoholics and heavy social drinkers show a bias of attention towards alcohol-related items. Previous research suggests that there is a shared foundation of attentional bias, which is linked to attentional control settings. Specifically, attentional bias relates to a persistent selection of a Feature Search Mode which prioritises attentional bias-related information for selection and processing. However, no research has yet examined the effect of pre-existing biases on the development of an additional attentional bias. This paper seeks to discover how pre-existing biases affect the formation of a new, additional attentional bias. Twenty-five heavy and 25 light social drinkers, with and without a pre-existing bias to alcohol-related items, respectively, had an attentional bias towards the colour green induced via an information sheet. They then completed a series of one-shot change detection tasks. In the critical task, green items were present but task-irrelevant. Irrelevant green items caused significantly more interference for light than heavy social drinkers. This somewhat counter intuitive result is likely due to heavy drinkers having more experience in exerting cognitive control over attentional biases, something not previously observed in investigations of the effects of holding an attentional bias. Our findings demonstrate for the first time that an established attentional bias significantly modulates future behaviour.
众所周知，酗酒者和重度社交饮酒者对与酒精相关的项目存在注意力偏向。先前的研究表明，存在注意力偏向的共同基础，这与注意力控制设置有关。具体来说，注意力偏向与持续选择特征搜索模式有关，该模式优先选择与注意力偏向相关的信息进行选择和处理。然而，尚未有研究探讨先前存在的偏向对额外注意力偏向形成的影响。本文旨在探究先前存在的偏向如何影响新的、额外的注意力偏向的形成。25 名重度和 25 名轻度社交饮酒者，分别具有和不具有对与酒精相关项目的先存偏向，通过信息表对绿色产生了注意力偏向。然后，他们完成了一系列单次变化检测任务。在关键任务中，出现了绿色项目，但与任务无关。无关的绿色项目对轻度社交饮酒者的干扰明显大于重度社交饮酒者。这一有些反直觉的结果可能是由于重度饮酒者在对注意力偏向施加认知控制方面有更多的经验，这在以前对注意力偏向的影响的研究中并未观察到。我们的研究结果首次表明，已建立的注意力偏向显著调节未来行为。
