Impaired Global Precedence Effect in Severe Alcohol Use Disorder and Korsakoff's Syndrome: A Pilot Exploration through a Global/Local Visual Paradigm

In healthy populations, visual abilities are characterized by a faster and more efficient processing of global features in a stimulus compared to local ones. This phenomenon is known as the global precedence effect (GPE), which is demonstrated by (1) a global advantage, resulting in faster response times for global features than local features and (2) interference from global distractors during the identification of local targets, but not vice versa. This GPE is essential for adapting visual processing in everyday life (e.g., extracting useful information from complex scenes). We investigated how the GPE is affected in patients with Korsakoff's syndrome (KS) compared to patients with severe alcohol use disorder (sAUD). Three groups (including healthy controls, patients with KS and patients with sAUD) completed a global/local visual task in which predefined targets appeared at the global or local level during either congruent or incongruent (i.e., interference) situations. The results showed that healthy controls (N = 41) presented a classical GPE, while patients with sAUD (N = 16) presented neither a global advantage nor global interference effects. Patients with KS (N = 7) presented no global advantage and an inversion of the interference effect, characterized by strong interference from local information during global processing. The absence of the GPE in sAUD and the interference from local information in KS have implications in daily-life situations, providing preliminary data for a better understanding of how these patients perceive their visual world.