Effects of acute alcohol intoxication on saccadic conflict and error processing

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroimaging

Background:

• Cognitive control is crucial for flexible behavior, involving suppression of automatic responses.
• The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is a key brain region for executive functions.
• Previous studies show alcohol affects ACC during conflict, but mainly with manual responses.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate alcohol's impact on cognitive control in the oculomotor system.
• To examine if alcohol's effects extend to inhibiting hardwired saccadic eye movements.

Main Methods:

• fMRI and eye tracking used in 22 healthy social drinkers.
• Participants performed prosaccades and antisaccades under alcohol and placebo conditions.
• Arterial spin labeling (ASL) corrected for alcohol's potential vascular effects on BOLD signals.

Main Results:

• A frontoparietal network supported saccadic conflict.
• Alcohol selectively reduced ACC activity during antisaccade performance and errors.
• This effect was observed despite controlling for alcohol's vasoactive properties.

Conclusions:

• The ACC is selectively vulnerable to alcohol intoxication during conflict across response types.
• This confirms the ACC's supramodal role in high-level cognitive control.
• Alcohol may impair self-control by reducing ACC activity, leading to behavioral disinhibition.