Abstract
Attentional bias (AB) has been suggested to contribute to the persistence of substance use behavior. However, the empirical evidence for its proposed role in addiction is inconsistent. This might be due to the inability of commonly used measures to differentiate between attentional engagement and attentional disengagement. Attesting to the importance of differentiating between both components of AB, a recent study using the odd-one-out task (OOOT) showed that substance use was differentially related to engagement and disengagement bias. However, the AB measures derived from the OOOT showed insufficient reliability to be used as a solid measure of individual differences. Therefore, the current study aimed to improve the reliability of the AB measures derived from the OOOT by using more distinct contrast stimuli, adding practice trials, increasing the number of trials, and by having participants perform the task in an alcohol-relevant context. We contrasted the original OOOT with the adapted OOOT (i.e., OOOT-adapt) and assessed AB in low- and high-drinking individuals. Participants were 245 undergraduate students who typically tend to drink either low or high amounts of alcohol. In one condition, AB was measured with the original OOOT in a typical laboratory context, whereas in the other condition, AB was measured with the OOOT-adapt in a bar (i.e., alcohol-relevant) context. The OOOT-adapt showed superior internal consistency, especially for the high-drinking group. Further, specifically the OOOT-adapt differentiated between low- and high-drinking participants showing that high drinkers engaged faster with alcohol cues than did low drinkers. Thus, the OOOT-adapt was found to be a promising candidate to reliably index AB in the context of alcohol use. The OOOT-adapt further showed superior criterion validity as it could differentiate between low- and high-drinking individuals, thereby adding to the evidence that AB might be involved in substance use behavior.
Highlights
Dual process models of addiction attribute an important role to automatic processes when explaining the development and persistence of addiction (Wiers et al, 2007; Stacy and Wiers, 2010)
Engagement bias is expressed by the difference between trials in which a disorder-relevant image is presented among disorder-irrelevant distractors and the neutral trial type, whereas disengagement bias is expressed by the difference between trials in which a disorder-irrelevant image is presented among disorder-relevant distractors and the neutral trial type
The current study showed that using more distinct non-alcohol contrast categories, adding practice trials and increasing the number of trials, having participants perform the Attentional bias (AB) assessment task in an alcohol-relevant context, and assessing AB in highdrinking individuals resulted in increased internal consistency of the alcohol AB measure
Summary
Dual process models of addiction attribute an important role to automatic processes when explaining the development and persistence of addiction (Wiers et al, 2007; Stacy and Wiers, 2010). One important reason for the limited knowledge about the role of engagement and disengagement bias relates to the fact that most measures of AB, such as the visual probe task (MacLeod et al, 1986), the addiction Stroop task (Cox et al, 2006), the flicker-induced change blindness task (Jones et al, 2002), or more recently developed tasks (e.g., Pennington et al, 2020), are not configured to differentiate between these two underlying processes of attention (Field and Cox, 2008; Grafton and MacLeod, 2014) That is, these assessment tasks deliver one overall index for AB. Engagement bias is expressed by the difference between trials in which a disorder-relevant image is presented among disorder-irrelevant distractors and the neutral trial type, whereas disengagement bias is expressed by the difference between trials in which a disorder-irrelevant image is presented among disorder-relevant distractors and the neutral trial type
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