Attentional bias toward substance cues in Methamphetamaine-addicted patients

Background & objectives: Attentional bias is a type of cognitive disorders, which involves different part of human life. Substance abuse causes attention-related disorders by reward system disturbing in brain which causes attentional bias of substance-addicted patients toward substance-related visual cues (SRC).Methods: In this study, 15 Methamphetamaine-addicted patients (MAP) participated as experimental group and 15 normal people (without dependence to any stimulants) participated as control group. Visual probe task was used to measure attentional bias of participants toward Methamphetamine-related (MR) images and neutral images (NI). Ten pairs of MR images and NI were shown for all participants in ten trials. in every trial, after disappearing of each pair of images, a visual probe task was shown instead of the place of one of two images and participants were asked to press a button which depicts the place of visual probe. Period of time lasted for participant to press correct button after appearing visual probe was considered as reaction time (RT) of participants.Results: Independent Samples T-test was used to determine difference average RTs toward MR images between control and experimental group. calculated P-value was 0.001 which was lesser than α (0.05). So hypothesis which illustrates that average RTs of two groups are not equivalent was accepted in β (0.95) confidence level.Interpretation & conclusions: RT toward special visual stimuli can be considered as criterion of attentional bias. Average RTs of experimental group participants toward MR images was lesser than average RTs of control group participants. It shows that MAP are more sensitive to Methamphetamaine-related visual stimulies so they have attentional bias toward them.

کلیدواژه ها:

component ، Attentional bias ، Cognitive disorder ، Methamphetamine ، Substance abuse ، Visual probe task