ArticlePsychopharmacology2020
Reduced attentional capture by reward following an acute dose of alcohol.
Article in Psychopharmacology, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 17 citations in OpenAlex.
- A Meta-Analytic Review of the Relationship Between Alcohol and Bystander Intervention for Sexual Assault.Trauma, violence & abuse · 2026Pooled it
- An interoceptive basis for alcohol priming effects.Psychopharmacology · 2021Trial
- Prediction and Prioritisation: How Reward Learning Shapes Attentional Capture.Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006) · 2026Review
- The effects of reward uncertainty and alcohol intoxication on human sign- and goal-tracking.Psychopharmacology · 2026Article
- Implementations of sign- and goal-tracking behavior in humans: A scoping review.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2025Article
- Attentional capture by signals of reward persists following outcome devaluation.Learning & memory (Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.) · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
rationalePrevious research has shown that physically salient and reward-related distractors can automatically capture attention and eye gaze in a visual search task, even though participants are motivated to ignore these stimuli.
objectivesTo examine whether an acute, low dose of alcohol would influence involuntary attentional capture by stimuli signalling reward.
methodsParticipants were assigned to the alcohol or placebo group before completing a visual search task. Successful identification of the target earned either a low or high monetary reward but this reward was omitted if any eye gaze was registered on the reward-signalling distractor.
resultsParticipants who had consumed alcohol were significantly less likely than those in the placebo condition to have their attention captured by a distractor stimulus that signalled the availability of high reward. Analysis of saccade latencies suggested that this difference reflected a reduction in the likelihood of impulsive eye movements following alcohol.
conclusionsOur findings suggest that alcohol intoxication reduces the capacity to attend to information in the environment that is not directly relevant to the task at hand. In the current task, this led to a performance benefit under alcohol, but in situations that require rapid responding to salient events, the effect on behaviour would be deleterious.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.