Alcohol Attenuates Load‐related Activation During a Working Memory Task: Relation to Level of Response to Alcohol

Paulus, Martin P.; Tapert, Susan F.; Pulido, Carmen; Schuckit, Marc A.

doi:10.1111/j.1530-0277.2006.00164.x

Cited by 53 publications

(58 citation statements)

References 60 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Using PET imaging with alcoholics and cocaine patients, research has shown a significant association between dopamine D2 receptor binding in the VS and drug craving as well as motivation for self-administration Martinez et al 2005Martinez et al , 2007. On the other hand, neuropsychological and imaging studies examining prefrontal executive functions, including impulse control, decision making and set shifting, have shown executive function deficits and hypo-frontal responses in addicted individuals compared to control volunteers (Ersche et al 2005(Ersche et al , 2006(Ersche et al , 2008Hester and Garavan 2004;Kaufman et al 2003;Li and Sinha 2008;Noel et al 2007;Paulus et al 2006). Together, these data show a distinct pattern of findings indicating that increased stress-and cueinduced craving and compulsive drug-seeking states in addicted individuals are associated with greater activity in the striatum, but decreased activity in specific regions of the cingulate and prefrontal cortex and related regions involved in controlling impulses and emotions (Li and Sinha 2008).…”

Section: Neural Correlates Of Stress and Drug Craving In Addictionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modeling Relapse Situations in the Human Laboratory

Sinha

2011

Current Topics in Behavioral Neurosciences

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

It is well known that alcoholism is a chronic relapsing illness. While stress significantly impacts alcoholism risk, there is also evidence that increasing levels of alcohol use affect peripheral and central stress and reward pathways thereby setting up a reciprocal relationship among the effects of alcohol consumption of the development, course of and recovery from alcoholism. This chapter reviews our efforts in assessing the integrity of stress pathways in alcoholism by examining whether altered responses of the stress pathways play a role in relapse risk. Using validated human laboratory procedures to model two of the most common situations that contribute to relapse risk, we review how such models in the laboratory can predict subsequent alcohol relapse. Empirical findings from human laboratory and brain imaging studies are reviewed to show that specific stress-related dysregulation accompanies the alcohol craving state in alcohol-dependent individuals, and such dysregulation along with increases in alcohol seeking are predictive of increased alcohol relapse risk. Finally, the significant implications of these findings for the development of novel treatment interventions that target stress processes and alcohol craving to improve alcoholism relapse outcomes are discussed.

show abstract

Section: Neural Correlates Of Stress and Drug Craving In Addictionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modeling Relapse Situations in the Human Laboratory

Sinha

2011

Current Topics in Behavioral Neurosciences

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…All participants were administered the same VWM task (Paulus et al, 2006;Tapert et al, 2004a) during fMRI acquisition. Each trial consisted of an array of 2, 4, or 6 colored dots briefl y (100 ms) presented against a gray background.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Brain Response to Working Memory Over Three Years of Adolescence: Influence of Initiating Heavy Drinking

Squeglia

Pulido

Wetherill

et al. 2012

J. Stud. Alcohol Drugs

Self Cite

146

138

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

ABSTRACT. Objective: Many adolescents engage in heavy alcohol use. The aim of this study was to disentangle whether brain abnormalities seen in adolescent heavy drinkers are a consequence of heavy drinking, a preexisting risk factor for initiation of alcohol use, or both. Method: Study 1 used cross-sectional functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) visual working-memory (VWM) data from 15-to 19-year-olds (20 heavy drinkers, 20 controls) to identify brain regions affected by heavy adolescent alcohol use. Study 2 used longitudinal fMRI VWM data from 12-to 16-year-olds imaged before the onset of drinking and imaged again on the same scanner approximately 3 years later. Those who had transitioned into heavy drinking (n = 20) were matched to continuous nondrinkers (n = 20) on baseline alcohol risk and developmental factors (N = 40; 80 scans). Results: Study 1 found that heavy drinkers exhibited more frontal and parietal but less occipital activation than controls, defi ning the regions of interest for Study 2. In Study 2, adolescents who later transitioned into heavy drinking showed less fMRI response contrast at baseline than continuous nondrinkers, which increased after the onset of heavy drinking, in frontal (1,431 µL, p = .003; η 2 = .19) and parietal (810 µL, p = .005; η 2 = .23) regions, as in Study 1. Lower baseline activation in the frontal and parietal regions predicted subsequent substance use, more so than commonly observed predictors of youth drinking (p < .05). Conclusions: Adolescents who initiated heavy drinking showed different brain activation before the onset of drinking, then less effi cient information processing after high-dose alcohol use started. This suggests neural response patterns that could be risk factors for future substance use and also supports prior neuropsychological reports indicating that initiating heavy episodic drinking in adolescence may be followed by subtle alterations in brain functioning. (J. Stud. Alcohol Drugs, 73, 749-760, 2012)

show abstract

“…Several previous studies of alcohol and attention have shown the alcohol impairs performance on divided-attention tasks (e.g., Lex et al, 1996;Maylor et al, 1990;Leigh et al, 1977;Fisk & Scerbo, 1987;Moskowitz & DePry, 1968) but has less consistent effects on concentrated attention tasks (Koelega, 1995). Therefore, we expect that most WM measures using a dual-task procedure, like the visual-spatial WM task used by Schweizer et al (2006), would be more sensitive to the effects of alcohol than a focusedattention task, like the array tasks used in the present experiment and the visual-spatial WM task used by Paulus et al (2006), that do not benefit from rehearsal, or the immediate verbal WM task that Schweizer et al (2006) combined with rehearsal-blocking activity. On the other hand, we still expect alcohol to affect certain focused attention tasks that profit from rehearsal and grouping, like the sequential tasks in our experiment and the backward digit span used by Finn et al (1999).…”

mentioning

confidence: 95%

“…Schweizer et al did find that alcohol impaired performance on a visual-spatial WM task (testing memory of three locations after a 30-s visual-spatial distraction task) during declining BAC (from 0.09 to 0.08), suggesting that alcohol effects on WM may be modality specific. However, Paulus, Tapert, Pulido, and Schuckit (2006) used a different visual-spatial WM task than Schweizer et al (a visual array comparison task after Luck and Vogel, 1997) and found no significant effect of alcohol (at a mean BAC of 0.06). Similarly, Weissenborn and Duka (2003) failed to find that alcohol impaired spatial working memory (remembering search locations in a self-ordered search task) or pattern recognition (recognizing patterns from a previous sequence of 12 patterns), but did find that it impaired planning (in a Tower of London test) and spatial recognition (recognizing locations from a previous sequence of 5 locations).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Differential effects of alcohol on working memory: Distinguishing multiple processes.

Saults

Cowan

Sher

et al. 2007

Experimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We assessed effects of alcohol consumption on different types of working memory (WM) tasks in an attempt to characterize the nature of alcohol effects on cognition. The WM tasks varied in two properties of materials to be retained in a two-stimulus comparison procedure. Conditions included (1) spatial arrays of colors, (2) temporal sequences of colors, (3) spatial arrays of spoken digits, and (4) temporal sequences of spoken digits. Alcohol consumption impaired memory for auditory and visual sequences, but not memory for simultaneous arrays of auditory or visual stimuli. These results suggest that processes needed to encode and maintain stimulus sequences, such as rehearsal, are more sensitive to alcohol intoxication than other WM mechanisms needed to maintain multiple concurrent items, such as focusing attention on them. These findings help to resolve disparate findings from prior research into alcohol's effect on WM and on divided attention. The results suggest that moderate doses of alcohol impair WM by affecting certain mnemonic strategies and executive processes rather than by shrinking the basic holding capacity of WM. KeywordsAlcohol; Ethanol; Intoxication; Working Memory; Rehearsal; Attention; Scope of Attention There is widespread agreement that acute alcohol intoxication affects cognitive functioning and that this cognitive impairment could mediate many diverse behavioral and affective consequences of alcohol intoxication. However, there has been considerable disagreement on how to characterize the cognitive effects of alcohol. This study addresses that question by documenting that a key component of cognition, working memory (WM), includes at least one process that is affected by acute alcohol intoxication and at least one process that is relatively spared. This detailed understanding is important, inasmuch as WM may be critically involved in most complex behaviors (e.g., Baddeley, 1986Baddeley, , 2001Cowan, 1999Cowan, , 2001).We define WM as the temporary maintenance of a limited amount of information in a heightened state of availability for use in cognitive tasks (cf. Cowan, 1999). Some consider WM to include the processes used to reactivate information in storage, such as covert rehearsal, or to manipulate the stored information (e.g., Baddeley, 1986Baddeley, , 2001. The exact definition is not critical for our purposes, provided that one keeps in mind that either strategic processing or storage theoretically could be affected by alcohol.The maintenance of some of the information in WM is thought to require attention (Cowan, 1999(Cowan, , 2001) as well as strategic processing such as rehearsal (Baddeley, 1986(Baddeley, , 2001 NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript contributions of automatic storage processes, like sensory memory, that do not require attention.) Attention and rehearsal also play prominent roles in leading theories of alcohol intoxication. Steele and Josephs (1990) proposed an attention-allocation hypothesis in which alcohol impairs cognit...

show abstract

Alcohol Attenuates Load‐related Activation During a Working Memory Task: Relation to Level of Response to Alcohol

Abstract: Background-A low level of response to alcohol is a major risk factor for the development of alcohol dependence, but neural correlates of this marker are unclear.

Cited by 53 publications

References 60 publications

Modeling Relapse Situations in the Human Laboratory

Modeling Relapse Situations in the Human Laboratory

Brain Response to Working Memory Over Three Years of Adolescence: Influence of Initiating Heavy Drinking

Differential effects of alcohol on working memory: Distinguishing multiple processes.

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About