Selective Attention Ability in Alcoholics and Non-Alcoholics

Abstract

Selective attention refers to the ability to focus on a particular activity by suppressing the background activities which may be taking place at the same time and the same place. The activity on which the focus is placed is termed as foreground and the other activity taking place simultaneously is called background. The present study aimed at studying selective attention in alcoholics and non-alcoholics by employing non-zero task and lexical decision task. Total of 40 participants were considered for the study out of them 20 were alcoholics (moderate alcoholics on DSM V) and the remaining 20 were non-alcoholics. The lexical decision task posed more load on the participants. The performance was measured through mean reaction time, and accuracy of performance on the two tasks was considered. Non-alcoholics over performed the alcoholic participants on both the tasks, however statistically significant difference was seen only for LDT indicating that the task was a better indicator to reflect the decline in selective attention in alcoholics.

Keywords: Selective attention, non-zero task, lexical decision task

Cite this Article

Abhishek B.P, Akhila Chandrashekar. Selective Attention Ability in Alcoholics and Non-alcoholics. Research & Reviews: Journal of Computational Biology. 2017; 6(3): 16–19p.