@article{ref1,
title="The effect of colour and size on attentional bias to alcohol-related pictures",
journal="Psicológica: revista de metodología y psicología experimental",
year="2014",
author="Harrison, Neil R. and McCann, Amy",
volume="35",
number="1",
pages="39-48",
abstract="Attentional bias plays an important role in the development and maintenance of alcohol addiction, and has often been measured with a visual probe task, where reaction times are compared for probes replacing either a substance-related cue or a neutral cue. Systematic low-level differences between image classes are a potential cause of low internal reliability of the probe task (Ataya et al., 2012). Moreover, it is unclear whether automatic attentional capture by low-level properties such as size and colour in the non-substance related image could reduce attentional bias to the alcohol-related cue. Here, alcohol-related attentional bias was assessed in moderate social drinkers by measuring reaction times to targets that replaced either an alcohol-related or a non-alcohol related (i.e., neutral) picture. All alcohol-related images were greyscale, and the neutral stimulus could be either greyscale (&quot;control&quot;), in colour (&quot;colour&quot;), or greyscale and 25% larger in size (&quot;25% larger size&quot;). We found attentional bias towards the alcohol-related stimuli in the control and 25% larger size conditions, but not in the colour condition. The magnitude of attentional bias was significantly reduced in the colour condition compared to the control and 25% larger size conditions. These findings indicate that salient low-level features in the non-substance related cue, in particular colour, can reduce the effect of alcohol-related content on the allocation of alcohol drinkers' attention. Further, the results highlight the need for image pairs in visual probe tasks to be closely matched on basic perceptual dimensions.<p /> <p>Language: en</p>",
language="en",
issn="0211-2159",
doi="",
url="http://dx.doi.org/"
}