Effects of a benzodiazepine, lorazepam, on motion integration and segmentation: an effect on the processing of line-ends?

Previous studies have shown that the perceptual integration of component motions distributed across space is inhibited whenever segmentation cues, such as line-ends, are salient. Herein, we investigate to what extent enhanced inhibition induced by lorazepam, a benzodiazepine facilitating the fixation of GABA on GABAA receptors, modifies the balance between motion integration and motion segmentation at the behavioural level. Motion integration was tested in 16 healthy volunteers taking a single and oral dose of either placebo or lorazepam (0.038 mg kg−1). The stimulus consisted of an outlined diamond presented behind four, otherwise invisible, apertures and translating along a circular trajectory (Lorenceau & Shiffrar (1992). Vision Research, 32, 263–273). Under these conditions, recovering the global diamond direction requires the integration of the component motions available within each aperture. The observers were asked to discriminate the global, clockwise or counter-clockwise, diamond direction under difficult—at high luminance contrasts—or easy—at low luminance contrasts—conditions. Overall, reaction times and error rates increased in the lorazepam group as compared to the placebo group, suggesting strong non-specific effects. However, the changes in performance in the lorazepam group are not homogeneous across conditions, suggesting that lorazepam also induces specific effects that modulate the integration/segmentation balance. Additional experiments performed with visible apertures or visible diamond vertices indicate that the effects of lorazepam are unlikely to reflect a deficit of motion processing or motion integration mechanisms since performance is only slightly impaired in the lorazepam as compared to the placebo group under these conditions. These results suggest that lorazepam might specifically modulate the saliency of line-ends, presumably because processing these features involves inhibitory mechanisms using GABA as a neuromediator, and in turn modify the balance between motion integration and segmentation.