Are alcohol-related attentional biases and holistic perception independent processes?

Excessive alcohol consumption is associated with the development of attentional biases for alcohol-related cues and their prioritization in heavy drinkers. Recently, it has been hypothesized that holistic processing may also play a role in this prioritization, with higher alcohol consumers exhibiting stronger holistic perception for alcohol cues. However, it is unclear how processing stimuli holistically may be related to attentional biases. We explored potential relationships between attentional biases, holistic processing, and alcohol consumption in a sample of drinkers using two tasks. In the first, a visual probe task replicated previous findings by showing an increased attentional bias for alcohol-related stimuli in individuals with higher alcohol consumption. Surprisingly, using an inversion paradigm to measure holistic perception in our second task, we showed