The effects of cue-specific inhibition training on alcohol consumption in heavy social drinkers

Training social drinkers to exercise motor inhibitory control leads to a reduction in alcohol consumption. However, it is unclear if participants should attempt to exercise inhibitory control in the presence of alcohol-related cues or if nonspecific inhibition training is equally effective. It is also unclear if comparable effects can be demonstrated by training oculomotor inhibitory control. We trained motor inhibition in the context of a modified stop-signal task (experiment 1) and oculomotor inhibition in the context of a modified antisaccade task (experiment 2) before investigating the influence of these manipulations on alcohol consumption. Results from experiment 1 demonstrated that training motor inhibition in the presence of alcohol-related cues led to reduced ad libitum alcohol consumption in the laboratory but not self-reported drinking in the week after training. These effects were seen in contrast to a control group that received no inhibition training and another control group that was trained to inhibit only in the presence of neutral cues; alcohol consumption did not differ between the latter two groups. In experiment 2, training of oculomotor inhibition in the presence of alcohol-related cues led to slowed eye movements toward target cues on catch trials, but it did not influence the proportion of inhibitory failures and had no influence on alcohol consumption in the laboratory. We conclude that training participants to exercise inhibitory control in the presence of alcohol-related cues can reduce alcohol consumption, but the effects are transient and are only seen when motor, but not oculomotor, inhibition is trained.