Quickly read this subject line of an email I once received at work. What pops into your head?
“Weekly webinar this Tuesday”
Here’s what my brain interpreted: “Weekly winebar this Tuesday”
Winebar? Sounds good, right? I do like wine.
Now, this did occur during COVID times, when wine was on my mind, well, not infrequently. So, my mistake made me pause. Was my brain fine-tuned to notice all things related to alcohol? Was this primed state also affecting what I remembered?
What the Research Says
I was reminded of this experience when I came across a study recently. The question researchers tackled was whether the mere sight of alcohol affects memory in heavier and lighter drinkers.
College students made up the sample, and they were sober during the experiment.
How was drinking level defined? The high drinkers averaged about two drinks per day. The low drinkers averaged less than two per month.
In the lab, participants saw a sequence of 15 object images—things like an umbrella and a football. However, halfway through the presentation, some people saw a picture of a whiskey bottle, and others saw a soda bottle.
Later, they tried to recall all the objects they had seen.
And here is where it got interesting.
For the heavier drinkers, a striking pattern emerged.
- They remembered the alcohol image (the whiskey bottle) better than the non-alcohol image (the soda).
- However, they were more likely to forget the objects that came right after the whiskey bottle.
The lighter drinkers did not show either of these effects.
So, for high drinkers, just seeing alcohol had an effect: better memory for the booze, but amnesia for whatever came after it.
Why This Effect Occurs
These findings are explained by a type of bias called attention narrowing. And it happens to all of us.
Basically, an emotional or important stimulus captures our attention, so we remember it better. But, there’s a cost. We don’t encode things that appear after it, or around it.
And the attention-grabbing cue doesn’t have to be alcohol. One of the researchers who discovered interference for alcohol found the same results in a different experiment, when the salient image was a nude photo.
And I didn’t mention an important fact. Attentional bias is “automatic.” That means it’s outside of awareness and hard to control. So, you couldn’t just tell yourself, “Don’t focus on the delicious whiskey!”
New Evidence
Now, that study was from 2007, so I was curious if it’d been replicated.
Indeed, the findings were recently confirmed. In a 2024 study, a team used eye-tracking to see what heavier drinkers paid attention to.
Participants saw a series of object pairs. And again, the heavier drinkers showed more bias for boozy images when compared to lighter drinkers. For instance, their eyes lingered on the glass of wine, rather than the vase beside it.
What Other Things Can Sway Attention and Memory?
We’d expect these effects to occur for any high-interest images.
Consider the things that distract you, personally. They might be cookies, video games, or even cats. For example, does this picture grab your attention?
Timing and Biology Also Matter
The news gets worse for women. They have an additional attentional bias to alcohol. But only at a certain time.
It happens during the ovulation phase. Images related to adult beverages are more rewarding then. Experts suggest it’s probably due to higher estrogen levels, particularly estradiol.
So, this news might be helpful for some women. But this pattern also provides an interesting example of how biology, environment, and attention interact in complex ways to influence behavior. And that basic recipe applies to everyone.
Can This Knowledge About Attentional Bias Be Useful?
Yes.
Clinicians treating addictions can apply this knowledge. For example, clients who understand the strong pull of seeing addiction-related things might alter their environment to reduce distraction.
Research also shows that the degree of attentional bias someone shows is linked to the level of substance dependence. For example, people with more bias have a higher risk of relapsing. So, a reduction in bias can be a marker of progress in recovery.
Here are two other applications:
1. Planning the Perfect Order
Put high-priority items on a list before tempting ones.
For instance, plan the ordering of your grocery list as carefully as an MLB lineup. If you’re fond of adult beverages, know that items after your booze are more likely to be forgotten. So, don’t stick the “must gets” there, like toilet paper.
2. Compensating
Now that you understand how attention narrowing works, use strategies to counteract harmful effects on remembering.
For instance, when I’m trying to access things on the internet—say, my bank account or the weather in Kansas to make sure no tornadoes are currently barreling toward my son—I often get distracted by news headlines.
Then I forget my original intention.
To prevent this, I’ve figured out a trick. I take a moment before being lured by the clickbait and write down my original plan—maybe on paper, maybe on my hand.
By the way, that’s a common strategy we memory researchers recommend. For a hard memory task, don’t make it a memory task. Just jot it down.
Should I Be Worried About That Email-Reading Error?
Okay, full disclosure. That time I misread “webinar” as “winebar” wasn’t a one-time deal. It happened several times.
But I’m not too concerned. That’s partly because I don’t drink that much and partly because I wasn’t wearing reading glasses, so I blame my presbyopia (maturing eyes).
I’ll sign off now because I just got a pop-up ad for Drinkin’ Donuts that caught my attention. That sounds like an excellent product.
Copyright Suzanna Penningroth
This article was also published on the Psychological Science Lite blog:
