Reduced attentional capture by reward following an acute dose of alcohol

Previous research has shown that physically salient and reward-related distractors can automatically capture attention and eye gaze in a visual search task, even though participants are motivated to ignore these stimuli.

To examine whether an acute, low dose of alcohol would influence involuntary attentional capture by stimuli signalling reward.

Participants were assigned to the alcohol or placebo group before completing a visual search task. Successful identification of the target earned either a low or high monetary reward but this reward was omitted if any eye gaze was registered on the reward-signalling distractor.

Participants who had consumed alcohol were significantly less likely than those in the placebo condition to have their attention captured by a distractor stimulus that signalled the availability of high reward. Analysis of saccade latencies suggested that this difference reflected a reduction in the likelihood of impulsive eye movements following alcohol.

Our findings suggest that alcohol intoxication reduces the capacity to attend to information in the environment that is not directly relevant to the task at hand. In the current task, this led to a performance benefit under alcohol, but in situations that require rapid responding to salient events, the effect on behaviour would be deleterious.