Coralie Creupelandt1,2, Pierre Maurage1, Bruno Bocanegra3, Sébastien Szaffarczyk4,5, Philippe de Timary6, Jory Deleuze7, Carine Lambot7, Fabien D'Hondt8,9,10. 1. Louvain Experimental Psychopathology Research Group (UCLEP), Psychological Sciences Research Institute (IPSY), UCLouvain, B-1348, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. 2. Centre National de Ressources Et de Résilience Lille-Paris (CN2R), 59000, Lille, France. 3. Department of Psychology, Educational, and Child Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam, The Netherlands. 4. Univ. Lille, Inserm, CHU Lille, U1172 - LilNCog - Lille Neuroscience & Cognition, 59000, Lille, France. 5. CURE, Service de Psychiatrie de L'enfant Et de L'adolescent, Hôpital Fontan 1, Clinique de Psychiatrie, CHU Lille, CS 70001, F-59000, Lille, France. 6. Department of Adult Psychiatry, Saint-Luc Academic Hospital, B-1200, Brussels, Belgium. 7. Le Beau Vallon, B-5002, Saint-Servais, Belgium. 8. Centre National de Ressources Et de Résilience Lille-Paris (CN2R), 59000, Lille, France. fabien.d-hondt@univ-lille.fr. 9. Univ. Lille, Inserm, CHU Lille, U1172 - LilNCog - Lille Neuroscience & Cognition, 59000, Lille, France. fabien.d-hondt@univ-lille.fr. 10. CURE, Service de Psychiatrie de L'enfant Et de L'adolescent, Hôpital Fontan 1, Clinique de Psychiatrie, CHU Lille, CS 70001, F-59000, Lille, France. fabien.d-hondt@univ-lille.fr.
Abstract
RATIONALE: Visuo-perceptive deficits in severe alcohol use disorder (SAUD) remain little understood, notably regarding the respective involvement of the two main human visual streams, i.e., magnocellular (MC) and parvocellular (PC) pathways, in these deficits. Besides, in healthy populations, low-level visual perception can adapt depending on the nature of visual cues, among which emotional features, but this MC and PC pathway adaptation to emotional content is unexplored in SAUD. OBJECTIVES: To assess MC and PC functioning as well as their emotional modulations in SAUD. METHODS: We used sensitivity indices (d') and repeated-measures analyses of variance to compare orientation judgments of Gabor patches sampled at various MC- and PC-related spatial frequencies in 35 individuals with SAUD and 38 matched healthy controls. We then explored how emotional content modulated performances by introducing neutral or fearful face cues immediately before the Gabor patches and added the type of cue in the analyses. RESULTS: SAUD patients showed a general reduction in sensitivity across all spatial frequencies, indicating impoverished processing of both coarse and fine-scale visual content. However, we observed selective impairments depending on facial cues: individuals with SAUD processed intermediate spatial frequencies less efficiently than healthy controls following neutral faces, whereas group differences emerged for the highest spatial frequencies following fearful faces. Altogether, SAUD was associated with mixed MC and PC deficits that may vary according to emotional content, in line with a flexible but suboptimal use of low-level visual content. Such subtle alterations could have implications for everyday life's complex visual judgments.
RATIONALE: Visuo-perceptive deficits in severe alcohol use disorder (SAUD) remain little understood, notably regarding the respective involvement of the two main human visual streams, i.e., magnocellular (MC) and parvocellular (PC) pathways, in these deficits. Besides, in healthy populations, low-level visual perception can adapt depending on the nature of visual cues, among which emotional features, but this MC and PC pathway adaptation to emotional content is unexplored in SAUD. OBJECTIVES: To assess MC and PC functioning as well as their emotional modulations in SAUD. METHODS: We used sensitivity indices (d') and repeated-measures analyses of variance to compare orientation judgments of Gabor patches sampled at various MC- and PC-related spatial frequencies in 35 individuals with SAUD and 38 matched healthy controls. We then explored how emotional content modulated performances by introducing neutral or fearful face cues immediately before the Gabor patches and added the type of cue in the analyses. RESULTS: SAUD patients showed a general reduction in sensitivity across all spatial frequencies, indicating impoverished processing of both coarse and fine-scale visual content. However, we observed selective impairments depending on facial cues: individuals with SAUD processed intermediate spatial frequencies less efficiently than healthy controls following neutral faces, whereas group differences emerged for the highest spatial frequencies following fearful faces. Altogether, SAUD was associated with mixed MC and PC deficits that may vary according to emotional content, in line with a flexible but suboptimal use of low-level visual content. Such subtle alterations could have implications for everyday life's complex visual judgments.