The Effects of Alcohol on Mind Wandering

Alcohol consumption alters consciousness in ways that make drinking both alluring and hazardous. Recent advances in the study of consciousness using a mind-wandering paradigm permit a rigorous examination of the effects of alcohol on experiential consciousness and metaconsciousness. Fifty-four male social drinkers consumed alcohol (0.82 g/kg) or a placebo beverage and then performed a mind-wandering reading task. This task indexed both self-caught and probe-caught zone-outs to distinguish between mind wandering inside and outside of awareness. Compared with participants who drank the placebo, those who drank alcohol were significantly more likely to report that they were zoning out when probed. After this increase in mind wandering was accounted for, alcohol also lowered the probability of catching oneself zoning out. The results suggest that alcohol increases mind wandering while simultaneously reducing the likelihood of noticing one’smindwandering.Findingsare discussedwith regard to theories of alcohol and theories of consciousness. Psychologists’ understanding of how alcohol affects emotion and behavior has undergone considerable change in recent years. Early theories, such as the tension-reduction hypothesis, assumed that alcohol directly affects emotion, reducing ‘‘tension’’ and thereby disinhibiting behavior (Conger, 1956). According to more recent theorizing, however, both the reinforcing and the hazardous effects of alcohol may at least in part be cognitively mediated (Curtin, Patrick, Lang, Cacioppo, & Birnbaumer, 2001; Hull & Slone, 2004; Sayette, 1999; Taylor & Leonard, 1983). For example, Steele and Josephs’ (1990) alcohol-myopia theory posits that alcohol ‘‘restricts attention to the salient, immediate aspects of experience’’ and ‘‘reduces processing capacity so that a greater proportion of this capacity has to be devoted to the demands of immediate, ongoing activity’’ (p. 929). Consider a man who has a bad workday and returns home to drink. Alcohol may relieve his worry if he is distracted by television, but he may ‘‘cry in his beer’’ if no such distraction is available (Steele & Josephs, 1990). Although alcohol-myopia theory continues to stimulate much research, core elements of the theory remain unresolved. For instance, as noted by Steele and Josephs (1990, footnote 3), it remains unclear which cues will be most salient to a person who is drinking (see also Sayette, 1993). In typical studies, salient distractor cues are explicitly manipulated. For example, intoxicated participants may be asked to prepare a stressful speech, and during this preparation, some of these participants may be given a series of pleasant images to evaluate. Intoxicated participants given no explicit distraction feel at least as anxious as sober participants, presumably because they focus on the upcoming speech, whereas intoxicated participants who are distracted by the images feel less anxious than sober participants (Josephs & Steele, 1990). Yet in many cases, alcohol may be anxiolytic even without explicit distraction (for a review, see Sayette, 1993). Such findings suggest that the association between alcohol and distraction is complex. Environmental distractors can influence the impact of intoxication on emotion and behavior, but in addition, alcohol may affect sensitivity to distraction. That is, even in the absence of explicit distractors, intoxicated participants may in some instances be distracted from stressful thoughts by internally generated cognitions (Steele & Josephs, 1990). Moreover, alcohol may simultaneously increase people’s susceptibility to distraction and undermine their ability to notice that they have become distracted in the first place. The current study addressed this possibility by testing the effect of alcohol on both the occurrence of mind wandering and the capacity to notice that one’s mind has wandered. Mind wandering—and, in particular, mind wandering during reading—provides an especially useful domain for exploring people’s capacity for noticing distraction (Schooler, 2002; Schooler & Schreiber, 2004; Smallwood, McSpadden, & Schooler, 2008). While reading, people often mind-wander without realizing it; that is, although they are fully conscious of Address correspondence to Michael Sayette, Department of Psychology, University of Pittsburgh, 3137 Sennott Square, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, e-mail: [email protected]. PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE Volume 20—Number 6 747 Copyright r 2009 Association for Psychological Science at UNIV CALIFORNIA SANTA BARBARA on June 3, 2013 pss.sagepub.com Downloaded from the topic that has distracted them (i.e., they are experientially conscious of that topic; Schooler, 2002), they lack explicit awareness (i.e., metaconsciousness; Schooler, 2002) of the fact that they are mind-wandering. At some point, they realize that they have beenmind-wandering and that they have been reading without understanding. The capacity to intermittently take stock of the current contents of thought (referred to interchangeably as metaconsciousness or meta-awareness; Schooler, 2002) appears to play an important role both in terminating mind-wandering episodes and in minimizing their impact on performance. This role of meta-awareness in mind wandering is supported by several lines of evidence. First, when randomly probed in an experience-sampling procedure, participants are regularly caught mind-wandering before they notice it themselves. Second, such ‘‘probe-caught’’ mind-wandering episodes are associated with greater comprehension disruption than are episodes when individuals catch themselves mind-wandering (Reichle et al., 2008; Smallwood, Fishman, & Schooler, 2007). Third, compared with mind-wandering episodes that occur with awareness, those that occur in the absence of awareness are associated with higher error rates on the concurrent task (Smallwood, McSpadden, & Schooler, 2008), and with different patterns of response times (Smallwood, McSpadden, Luus, & Schooler, 2008) and brain activation (Smallwood, Beach, Schooler, & Handy, 2008). Thus, mind wandering affords an opportunity to investigate not only the propensity for distraction, but also the capacity for a higher-order form of monitoring (metaconsciousness)—that is, the capacity for monitoring whether one’s mind has wandered. We aimed to examine how alcohol affects the propensity to lapse into mind wandering and the ability to detect such lapses. We employed a paradigm that we have used to study mind wandering during reading (Reichle et al., 2008; Schooler, Reichle, &Halpern, 2004; Smallwood, McSpadden, & Schooler, 2008). Participants read text displayed on a computer while simultaneously monitoring their reading performance and indicating occurrences of mind wandering (or ‘‘zoning out’’). Selfcaught mind-wandering episodes provided a measure of mind wandering that had reached meta-awareness. Participants also periodically responded to prompts asking if they were zoning out. The purpose of including this experience-sampling procedure (Hurlburt, 1993) in combination with the self-report measure was to catch participants zoning out before they reported this fact spontaneously—that is, to catch instances when they were mind-wandering without being aware that they were doing so. This approach has advantages over zone-out assessments recorded following task completion (see Smallwood & Schooler, 2006). By combining self-report and experiencesampling measures of mind wandering, we were able to assess the impact of alcohol both on the frequency of mind wandering (as revealed by the experience-sampling measure) and on the meta-awareness of mind wandering (as revealed by the self-report measure). In this study, participants performed the mind-wandering task after consuming either alcohol or a placebo. We hypothesized that alcohol, which has been found to reduce self-awareness (Hull, 1981), would increase the overall amount of time spent mind-wandering (as revealed by the proportion of times that experience-sampling probes caught participants mind-wandering), and would also interfere with the capacity to notice that one’s mind has wandered.