Different effects of alcohol on automatic detection of colour, location and time change: a mismatch negativity study

The effects of alcohol on pre-attentive processing have been well studied in the past decades. However, the majority of studies focus on pre-attentive auditory processing and only a few studies have examined the effects of alcohol on visual processing. This study investigates the effects of alcohol on automatic pre-attentive processing of visual changes in colour, location and duration. We compared the mean amplitudes and the amplitude decline ratios of visual mismatch negativity (vMMN) responses elicited for small and large changes in image colour, location and duration in 12 individuals under the influence of alcohol and in a placebo condition. The vMMN amplitudes for changes in location and duration significantly decreased in the alcohol condition as compared with the placebo condition, and the magnitude of decrease was not related to the magnitude of change in the deviant stimuli. However, the amplitude of colour vMMN, in the alcohol condition, did not change significantly compared to the placebo condition. These results show that pre-attentive visual processing is impaired by alcohol, and that this impairment may be feature-specific. In addition, this impairment was not related to the magnitude of stimuli change.