A balanced placebo investigation of the effects of alcohol vs. alcohol expectancy on simulated driving behavior

Differential effects of alcohol and alcohol expectancy on risk‐taking during simulated driving

“…number of cones hit). This finding is in partial agreement with previous work that also examined the separate and combined effects of alcohol and expectancy on simulated driving behavior (Rimm et al, 1982). In that study, the expectation of alcohol had no effect on any performance measures, but a dose of alcohol that produced a mean BrAC of 0.064% did produce a marginal impairment in subjects' braking and steering performance.…”

“…Incentives and immediate performance feedback have been shown to reduce impairment due to alcohol on cognitive tasks and measures of hand-eye coordination (Vogel-Sprott and SdaoJarvie, 1989;Gustafson and Källmén, 1990). Thus, the incentive of additional monetary compensation and the presentation of immediate feedback concerning the adequacy of subjects' driving performance in the present study may account for the discrepancy in observed impairment between the present study and that conducted by Rimm et al (1982).…”

Memory encoding and retrieval on the ascending and descending limbs of the blood alcohol concentration curve

“…Such expectancy can improve performance by means of compensation (Marczinski and Fillmore 2005), but can also impair performance (Fillmore et al 1998) or have no noticeable effect (Connors and Maisto 1980;Rimm et al 1982;Nagoshi et al 1992). Memory performance is usually unaffected by alcohol expectancy (Miller et al 1978;Nelson et al 1986;Assefi and Garry 2003), although memory was reduced as compared to controls following the ingestion of a placebo pill said to impair memory performance (Kvavilashvili and Ellis 1999).…”

Compensating for alcohol-induced impairment of control: effects on inhibition and activation of behavior

“…The inconsistent evidence for compensatory effects of previous studies may be due to the variety of tasks utilized across studies . Placebo effects have been examined in laboratory tasks that measure memory recall, reaction time, fine motor coordination, time perception, and simulated driving performance (Assefi and Garry 2003;Connors and Maisto 1980;Fillmore and Vogel-Sprott 1992;Lapp et al 1994;Nagoshi et al 1992;Rimm et al 1982). These tasks typically measure complex behavioral functions that each require multiple cognitive and behavioral operations in maintaining efficient performance (e.g., selective attention, decision making, motor programming).…”