The Impact of Emotional and Hedonic Stimuli on Voluntary Attention in Alcoholics: A Dichotic Listening Study

ALBA FERRARA, L.; MULLER-OEHRING, E.; SCHULTE, T.; LYLYK, P.

Rio de Janeiro

Congreso; International brain research organization congress; 2015

IBRO

BACKGROUND: Attention is captured by salient stimuli, and salience may derive from the physical features of the stimuli (I.e. a scream) or from conditioned reward properties. In alcoholism, alcohol related stimuli gains salience and capture the patient?s attention involuntarily, diminishing attentional control. Dichotic listening can assess the interplay between involuntary attentional capture by salient stimuli and attentional control in the auditory channel. By using two forced-choice dichotic listening tasks, we investigate how voluntary attention is modulated by salient stimuli (emotional or hedonic) in alcoholism. We predict that participants perform generally slower in a dichotic listening task when salient stimuli (emotional and hedonic) are presented as distractors opposite to the attended side, causing interference. Moreover, alcoholics will be especially susceptible to hedonic interference compared to controls.METHODS: 23 recently abstinent alcoholics (ALC) and 23 healthy controls (HC) completed two similar dichotic listening tasks (emotional, hedonic). In the emotional task an emotional vocal outburst was paired with a neutral vocalization simultaneously presented, one to each ear. Participants reported whether the voice conveyed emotion or not while attending to either the left or right ear. For the hedonic task, two object sounds, one alcohol related (I.e. a cork popping out) and another no-alcohol related (I.e. an engine starting) were paired again in a dichotic manner and participants reported whether the heard sound was alcohol related or not. Baseline trials with pairs formed by only neutral (emotional task) and no-alcohol sounds (hedonic task) were included. Two factorial ANOVA (one per task) were performed on reaction times (RTs) data with Attended ear (left, right) and Type of trial (salience on the attended side, salience on the unattended side, baseline) as a within subject factors, and Group (HC, ALC) as a between subject factor.RESULTS: RTs for the emotional task were significantly slower when the emotional voice was on the unattended side compared to the attended side. There was also a main effect of Group meaning that ALC obtained slower RTs than HC. For the hedonic task, the slowest RTs were obtained when the alcohol-related stimuli was on the unattended ear compared to the attended ear and baseline. We did not find Group differences neither interactions with Group.DISCUSSION: As predicted, salient distractors on the unattended side resulted in longer RTs, reflecting: a) involuntary attentional ?capture? by emotional and hedonic stimuli and b) greater processing load and increasing effortful voluntary attention. Importantly, ALC were generally slower than HC in the emotional but not in the hedonic task, which might reflect general difficulties in processing emotional but not hedonic stimuli in alcoholism. fMRI data is being collected to reveal the neural networks recruited to process hedonic stimuli on both groups.