Why some people just can't seem to pay attention Chronic alcoholism has long been associated with neuropsychological deficits. These deficits include an inability to maintain attention. A recent study examined the cerebral basis of involuntary attention shifting in alcoholics and social drinkers.
Alcoholics seem to be more sensitive to task-irrelevant stimuli.
Alcoholics that begin to drink heavily in their teens seem to be particularly susceptible. Involuntary attention shifting is a fundamental function that allows one to orient to unexpected and potentially harmful changes in the environment. Yet despite its survival value, the involuntary switching of attention to environmental stimuli needs to be controlled when concentrating on goal-directed tasks. One of the reasons for this is that attention is involved in several cognitive functions, such as perception and memory. Participants were asked to discriminate between two tones of different durations in a measured reaction-time task, and to ignore occasional, varied frequency changes in the same tones.