Although mindfulness has been linked with salutary clinical outcomes, less is known about its relation to cognitive mechanisms implicated in the onset and maintenance of alcohol dependence. Because trait mindfulness is associated with attentional control and emotion regulation, we hypothesized that trait mindfulness would be inversely associated with attentional bias towards visual alcohol cues. We tested this hypothesis in a sample of alcohol-dependent adults residing in a treatment facility, who completed questionnaires on trait mindfulness, craving, and stress, as well as a spatial cueing task designed to assess alcohol attentional bias. Recovering alcohol-dependent individuals high in trait mindfulness exhibited less alcohol attentional bias (AB), stress, and craving, and greater alcohol-related self-efficacy, than their counterparts low in trait mindfulness. Multiple linear regression analyses indicated that trait mindfulness was more predictive of alcohol AB than stress, craving, alcohol-related self-efficacy, time in treatment, or pre-treatment level of alcohol consumption. Identification of malleable traits that can offset automatic cognitive mechanisms implicated in addiction may prove to be crucial to treatment development efforts.

Rationale-While it is well documented that substance users exhibit attentional bias toward addiction-related stimuli, the exact mechanism remains unclear.Objectives-To differentiate between distinct aspects of attentional allocation in the smoking-cue attentional bias observed in smokers.Methods-Active smokers (AS) and non-smoking controls completed spatial cueing tasks with pairs of smoking and neutral pictorial cues to measure attentional capture, and an attentional blink task with either a smoking or neutral image appearing behind the first target (T1) to measure aspects of attention separate from capture. In addition, we tested groups of sports enthusiasts, and nonenthusiasts in corresponding tasks replacing smoking images with sports-related images to address the possibility that effects found in the smoking study were due simply to greater stimulus familiarity.Results-Smoking cues reflexively capture smokers' attention, as AS showed a greater bias toward smoking cues in short stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA; the time between the onset of two stimuli) trials, but not in trials with a longer SOA. These effects represent a facilitation of responding to smoking-versus neutral-cued targets, and were absent in the sports control task. The attentional blink effects were similar in the smoking-and sports-cue experiments: the special T1 resulted in better detection of the second target for the smokers and sports enthusiasts.Conclusions-Stimulus familiarity may contribute to some aspects of attentional bias in regular nicotine users, but selective quick capture of attention by smoking cues may be nicotine-habit specific.

Spatial attention can be reflexively captured by a physically salient stimulus, effortfully directed toward a relevant location, or involuntarily oriented in the direction of another person's gaze (i.e., social gaze orienting). Here, we used event-related potentials to compare the effects of these three types of orienting on multiple stages of subsequent target processing. Although gaze orienting has been associated more strongly with reflexive capture than with voluntary attention, the present data provide new evidence that the neural effects of social gaze orienting are markedly different from the effects of reflexive attentional capture by physically salient stimuli. Specifically, despite their similar behavioral effects, social gaze orienting and reflexive capture produce different effects on both early sensory processing (~120 ms; P1/N1 components) and later, higher-order processing (~300 ms; P3 component). In contrast, the effects of social gaze orienting were highly similar to those of voluntary orienting at these stages of target processing.

No abstract

The automatic capture of attention by drug cues, or attentional bias, is associated with craving and predicts future drug use. Despite its clinical significance, the neural bases of attentional bias to drug cues is not well understood. To address this gap, we undertook a neuroimaging investigation of the neural correlates of attentional bias towards smoking cues. Twenty-nine adults, including 14 active smokers and 15 non-smokers, completed a spatial cuing task during fMRI. A multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) decoded the neural responses to the brief presentation of smoking versus neutral images. These data were correlated with behavioral measures of attentional bias, which included analyses targeting the neural correlates of response facilitation and cue-related task interference. We detected a set of brain-behavioral correlates that were similar across both smokers and non-smokers, indicating a role for stimuli salience in the absence of nicotine conditioning in smoking cue attentional bias. However, multiple smoking-related modifications to the neural correlates of attentional bias and its components were also identified. For example, regions demonstrating smoking-related differences in the neural correlates of attentional bias included the rostral anterior cingulate cortex and inferior frontal gyrus. Response facilitation effects of smoking were observed in the right orbitofrontal gyrus and bilateral middle temporal gyrus. Smoking-cue related task interference was related to smoking-related effects in the frontal eye fields. Our findings suggest that multiple cognitive, affective, and visual object recognition processes contribute to attentional bias towards smoking cues, and suggest multiple circuit modifications that may contribute to perpetuation of addiction.