A critical review of the literature on attentional bias in cocaine use disorder and suggestions for future research.

Abstract

Cocaine use disorder (CUD) continues to be an important public health problem and novel approaches are needed to improve the effectiveness of treatments for CUD. Recently, there has been increased interest in the role of automatic cognition such as attentional bias (AB) in addictive behaviors and AB has been proposed to be a cognitive marker for addictions. Automatic cognition may be particularly relevant to CUD as there is evidence for particularly robust AB to cocaine cues and strong relationships to craving for cocaine and other illicit drugs. Further, the wide-ranging cognitive deficits (e.g., in response inhibition and working memory) evinced by many cocaine users enhance the potential importance of interventions targeting automatic cognition in this population. In the current paper, we discuss relevant addiction theories, followed by a review of studies that examined AB in CUD. We then consider the neural substrates of attentional bias including human neuroimaging, neurobiological and pharmacological studies. We conclude with a discussion of research gaps and future directions for attentional bias in CUD.

Impulsivity and attentional bias as predictors of modafinil treatment outcome for retention and drug use in crack-cocaine dependent patients: Results of a randomised controlled trial

“…Also, it was recently suggested that attentional bias can be assessed more adequately with visual, rather than manual, responses to drug-related stimuli (Dias et al, 2015;Marks et al, 2014b), given that eye fixation time is a sensitive and reliable method for measuring attention allocation to cocaine-related cues with a high test-retest reliability, in contrast to motor response time (Marks et al, 2014a). In summary, it is widely accepted that attentional bias to cocaine-related cues is present in cocainedependent patients (Leeman et al, 2014), but its prognostic value as measured with the addiction Stroop task remains to be more firmly established.…”

An electrophysiological dissociation of craving and stimulus-dependent attentional capture in smokers

“…Findings such as these have been replicated across various substances of addiction, from cigarettes (e.g., Attwood, O'Sullivan, Leonards, Mackintosh, & Munafò, 2008) to alcohol (e.g., Field, Mogg, Zetteler, & Bradley, 2004), to opiates (e.g., Lubman, Peters, Mogg, Bradley, & Deakin, 2000); however, such attentional capture is not consistently observed in all studies (see, e.g., Bradley, Mogg, Wright, & Field, 2003, Exp. 1) and may depend on the level of substance dependence (Hogarth, Mogg, Bradley, Duka, & Dickinson, 2003), the gender of the participants (Perlato, Santandrea, Libera, & Chelazzi, 2014), and how such bias is measured across various types of addictions (Field & Cox, 2008;Hendrikse et al, 2015;Leeman, Robinson, Waters, & Sofuoglu, 2014).…”

Effectiveness of Web-based Cognitive Bias Intervention for Psychiatric Disorders: A Systematic Review Protocol (Preprint)

“…Attention bias modification typically involves re-training individuals to attend to either neutral or positive cues (5). Tasks used for attention bias modification include that of the Stroop task, the Visual probe task and eye-tracking tasks (5,6). To retrain attentional biases, these tasks involve the pairing of probes or words with neutral stimuli instead of the threatening stimuli.…”