Differential effects of alcohol on working memory: Distinguishing multiple processes.

Abstract

We assessed effects of alcohol consumption on different types of working memory (WM) tasks in an attempt to characterize the nature of alcohol effects on cognition. The WM tasks varied in two properties of materials to be retained in a two-stimulus comparison procedure. Conditions included (1) spatial arrays of colors, (2) temporal sequences of colors, (3) spatial arrays of spoken digits, and (4) temporal sequences of spoken digits. Alcohol consumption impaired memory for auditory and visual sequences, but not memory for simultaneous arrays of auditory or visual stimuli. These results suggest that processes needed to encode and maintain stimulus sequences, such as rehearsal, are more sensitive to alcohol intoxication than other WM mechanisms needed to maintain multiple concurrent items, such as focusing attention on them. These findings help to resolve disparate findings from prior research into alcohol's effect on WM and on divided attention. The results suggest that moderate doses of alcohol impair WM by affecting certain mnemonic strategies and executive processes rather than by shrinking the basic holding capacity of WM. KeywordsAlcohol; Ethanol; Intoxication; Working Memory; Rehearsal; Attention; Scope of Attention There is widespread agreement that acute alcohol intoxication affects cognitive functioning and that this cognitive impairment could mediate many diverse behavioral and affective consequences of alcohol intoxication. However, there has been considerable disagreement on how to characterize the cognitive effects of alcohol. This study addresses that question by documenting that a key component of cognition, working memory (WM), includes at least one process that is affected by acute alcohol intoxication and at least one process that is relatively spared. This detailed understanding is important, inasmuch as WM may be critically involved in most complex behaviors (e.g., Baddeley, 1986Baddeley, , 2001Cowan, 1999Cowan, , 2001).We define WM as the temporary maintenance of a limited amount of information in a heightened state of availability for use in cognitive tasks (cf. Cowan, 1999). Some consider WM to include the processes used to reactivate information in storage, such as covert rehearsal, or to manipulate the stored information (e.g., Baddeley, 1986Baddeley, , 2001. The exact definition is not critical for our purposes, provided that one keeps in mind that either strategic processing or storage theoretically could be affected by alcohol.The maintenance of some of the information in WM is thought to require attention (Cowan, 1999(Cowan, , 2001) as well as strategic processing such as rehearsal (Baddeley, 1986(Baddeley, , 2001 NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript contributions of automatic storage processes, like sensory memory, that do not require attention.) Attention and rehearsal also play prominent roles in leading theories of alcohol intoxication. Steele and Josephs (1990) proposed an attention-allocation hypothesis in which alcohol impairs cognit...

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