Alcohol Hangover Differentially Modulates the Processing of Relevant and Irrelevant Information

Abstract

Elevated distractibility is one of the major contributors to alcohol hangover-induced behavioral deficits. Yet, the basic mechanisms driving increased distractibility during hangovers are still not very well understood. Aside from impairments in attention and psychomotor functions, changes in stimulus-response bindings may also increase responding to distracting information, as suggested by the theory of event coding (TEC). Yet, this has never been investigated in the context of alcohol hangover. Therefore, we investigated whether alcohol hangover has different effects on target-response bindings and distractor-response bindings using a task that allows to differentiate these two phenomena. A total of n = 35 healthy males aged 19 to 28 were tested once sober and once hungover after being intoxicated in a standardized experimental drinking setting the night before (2.64 gr of alcohol per estimated liter of body water). We found that alcohol hangover reduced distractor-response bindings, while no such impairment was found for target-response bindings, which appeared to be unaffected. Our findings imply that the processing of distracting information is most likely not increased, but in fact decreased by hangover. This suggests that increased distractibility during alcohol hangover is most likely not caused by modulations in distractor-response bindings.

Effects of alcohol hangover on attentional resources during a verbal memory/psychomotor tracking dual attention task

“…Instead, AH may be acting on attentional allocation processes, which consequently interferes with memory recognition. This is largely consistent with previous research that found faster processing of visual information during AH (Stock et al 2017 ), as well as an increase in the processing of task-irrelevant information during AH compared with control conditions (Opitz et al 2020 ).…”

Alcohol Hangover Does Not Alter the Application of Model-Based and Model-Free Learning Strategies

“…There were no previous studies investigating the size of hangover effects in Markov decision tasks, but studies on other cognitive control domains reported effect sizes between f = 0.32 and f = 0.6 for their reported hangover effects in comparable within-subject study designs [11,17,35]. Based on this, we estimated the required sample size for two repeated measures sessions (sober vs. hungover) and five relevant measures (MF-score, MB-score, final score, ω, π) at an alpha error probability of 5% and a power of 95% for an estimated medium effect size of f = 0.30 (assuming a default inter-correlation of 0.5).…”

The Alcohol Hangover Research Group: Ten Years of Progress in Research on the Causes, Consequences, and Treatment of the Alcohol Hangover

“…Three articles from Stock and colleagues investigated this in more detail. In article 19, they demonstrate that the alcohol hangover differentially modulates the processing of relevant and irrelevant information [ 37 ], and article 20 discusses findings showing that the alcohol hangover slightly impairs response selection but not response inhibition [ 38 ]. Finally, article 21 shows that the alcohol hangover does not alter the application of model-based and model-free learning strategies [ 39 ].…”