When Alcohol Adverts Catch the Eye: A Psychometrically Reliable Dual-Probe Measure of Attentional Bias.

Sera Wiechert,Reinout W Wiers,Colin Macleod,Ben Grafton

doi:10.3390/ijerph182413263

Abstract

Existing tasks assessing substance-related attentional biases are characterized by low internal consistency and test–retest reliability. This study aimed to assess the psychometric properties of a novel dual-probe task to measure alcohol-related attentional bias. Undergraduate students were recruited in June 2019 (N = 63; final N = 57; mean age = 20.88, SD = 2.63, 67% females). In the dual-probe task, participants were presented with simultaneous visual streams of adverts promoting either alcoholic or non-alcoholic drinks, and probes were presented in both streams. The dual-probe task measured the percentage of accurately identified probes that appeared on alcohol adverts in relation to total accuracy. The dual-probe task displayed excellent split-half reliability (M = 0.90, SD = 0.11; α = 0.90; 95% CI [0.84, 0.93]), and the derived attentional bias measure was significantly positively associated with beer drinking in a taste-test (r (57) = 0.33, p = 0.013; 95% CI [0.07, 0.54]), with habitual drinking (r (57) = 0.27, p = 0.045; 95% CI [0.01, 0.49]), and with increased craving (r (57) = 0.29, p = 0.031; 95% CI [0.03, 0.51]). Thus, the dual-probe task assessed attentional bias with excellent internal consistency and was associated with laboratory and habitual drinking measures, demonstrating initial support for the task’s utility in addiction research.

Highlights

This bias is thought to develop through the process of “incentive sensitization” [6,7], whereby repeated pairing of alcohol cues with alcohol use and its effects leads to the increased salience of these cues, which capture attention
In the initial sample of 63 participants, 1 participant was excluded due to a positive breath alcohol test at the beginning of the experiment, 4 participants were excluded as they responded to less than 75% of the probes, and 1 participant was excluded as they correctly identified a probe on less than 75% of trials on which they responded to a probe
As previous instruments assessing attentional bias were shown to have insufficient, if not poor, reliability [8,11], the current study developed a new variant of the dual-probe approach, in which attentional bias to alcohol adverts was assessed

Summary

Introduction

Cognitive biases, including attentional bias, are proposed to be factors that causally contribute to the development and maintenance of alcohol use disorders [1,2,3] According to the attentional bias hypothesis, individual differences in alcohol consumption reflect variation in the degree to which people selectively attend to alcohol-related information [5]. This bias is thought to develop through the process of “incentive sensitization” [6,7], whereby repeated pairing of alcohol cues with alcohol use and its effects leads to the increased salience of these cues, which capture attention

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