Citation

Lannoy S, Heeren A, Dormal V, Billieux J, Maurage P. Neurosci. Biobehav. Rev. 2019; 98: 58-60.

Affiliation

Laboratory for Experimental Psychopathology (LEP), Psychological Science Research Institute, Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. Electronic address: pierre.maurage@uclouvain.be.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2019, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.neubiorev.2019.01.006

PMID

30629977

Abstract

Binge drinking is an excessive pattern of alcohol use, highly prevalent in adolescents and young adults. Several studies have explored the cognitive impairments associated with binge drinking, and Carbia et al. (2018) recently proposed a systematic review of these impairments. Although this review offers an insightful and up-to-date synthesis of this research field, the authors concluded that binge drinking is not associated with attentional impairments. We argue that such conclusion is premature. We identified published studies not mentioned by Carbia et al. (2018), which documented attentional impairments in binge drinking. In particular, a differential exploration of attentional networks has suggested that binge drinkers not only exhibit impairments for the executive control of attention, but also for its alerting network. We thus recommend a better consideration of attention in future experimental and translational research agendas.

Copyright © 2019. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Language: en

Keywords

alerting; attention; attentional networks; binge drinking