Neuroscience
For students who like a tipple or three, the mere sight of a bottle of Jack Daniels can have a detrimental effect on their memory. Dennis Kramer and Stephen Schmidt, who made the observation, said this is probably due to the emotional salience alcohol has for those who drink a lot.
One hundred and twenty students performed a task reminiscent of the Generation Game, which involved them observing pictures of 15 everyday objects, such as a hammer or a banana, and then attempting to recall them 5 minutes later. After the memory task, the students were split into high and low drinkers based on their average number of drinks per month.
For some of the students, the eighth item in the memory test was a bottle of Jack Daniels, while others saw a bottle of Pepsi Cola in its place. It turns out that among the high drinkers only, memory performance was significantly affected by the the nature of this eighth item.
Firstly, the high drinkers, but not the low drinkers, were more likely to recall the Jack Daniels than the Pepsi Cola. Moreover, the high drinkers who saw whiskey in the eighth position, were far less likely to recall the next three items in the memory test, than were the high drinkers who were shown Cola. This memory-impairing effect of whiskey was not observed among the low drinkers.
The researchers said this is consistent with the idea that alcohol had acquired an emotional salience to the high drinkers, leading to an attention-narrowing effect that impaired their encoding of the items that followed the picture of whiskey. A similar effect was observed in an earlier study when a nude picture was inserted among a series of to-be-remembered items.
The researchers concluded that a test like the one used in this study might be helpful in measuring how effective alcohol interventions have been at changing people's feelings towards drink.
_________________________________
Kramer, D.A. & Schmidt, S.R. (2007). Alcohol beverage cues impair memory in high social drinkers, 21, 1535-1545. Cognition and Emotion, 21, 1535-1545.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
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Neuroscience
The mere sight of alcohol impairs drinkers' memories
For students who like a tipple or three, the mere sight of a bottle of Jack Daniels can have a detrimental effect on their memory. Dennis Kramer and Stephen Schmidt, who made the observation, said this is probably due to the emotional salience alcohol has for those who drink a lot.One hundred and twenty students performed a task reminiscent of the Generation Game, which involved them observing pictures of 15 everyday objects, such as a hammer or a banana, and then attempting to recall them 5 minutes later. After the memory task, the students were split into high and low drinkers based on their average number of drinks per month.
For some of the students, the eighth item in the memory test was a bottle of Jack Daniels, while others saw a bottle of Pepsi Cola in its place. It turns out that among the high drinkers only, memory performance was significantly affected by the the nature of this eighth item.
Firstly, the high drinkers, but not the low drinkers, were more likely to recall the Jack Daniels than the Pepsi Cola. Moreover, the high drinkers who saw whiskey in the eighth position, were far less likely to recall the next three items in the memory test, than were the high drinkers who were shown Cola. This memory-impairing effect of whiskey was not observed among the low drinkers.
The researchers said this is consistent with the idea that alcohol had acquired an emotional salience to the high drinkers, leading to an attention-narrowing effect that impaired their encoding of the items that followed the picture of whiskey. A similar effect was observed in an earlier study when a nude picture was inserted among a series of to-be-remembered items.
The researchers concluded that a test like the one used in this study might be helpful in measuring how effective alcohol interventions have been at changing people's feelings towards drink.
_________________________________
Kramer, D.A. & Schmidt, S.R. (2007). Alcohol beverage cues impair memory in high social drinkers, 21, 1535-1545. Cognition and Emotion, 21, 1535-1545.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
- They Need To "man Up!" - What Students Who Drink Think Of Those Who Don't
There's a scene in the 2013 comedy film The World's End in which a group of middle-aged old school friends are on a nostalgic pub crawl, yet one of them, Andy Knightly, insists on abstaining from alcohol. "I haven't had a drink for sixteen...
- Extras
10 eye-catching studies that didn't make the final cut: Watching your favourite TV shows restores your levels of self-control. Nearly one third of pedestrians were distracted by their phone when crossing the road. Extreme political views are often...
- What's The Link Between Left-handedness And Drinking Behaviour?
Back in the 70's, psychologist Paul Bakan published a short research report in which he noted that among 47 inpatients on an alcoholism ward, 7 were left-handed - more than you'd expect based on the approximate 10-per cent prevalence of left-handedness...
- Beware Short, Wide Glasses
If your New Year’s resolution is to drink less, you may find it useful to know that because of perceptual biases, people tend to pour more liquid into short, wide glasses – ‘tumblers’ – than they pour into tall, elongated, ‘highball’ glasses....
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