RESUMO
The authors 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 2 properties of materials to be retained in a 2-stimulus comparison procedure. Conditions included (a) spatial arrays of colors, (b) temporal sequences of colors, (c) spatial arrays of spoken digits, and (d) 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 on 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.
Assuntos
Etanol/farmacologia , Rememoração Mental/efeitos dos fármacos , Retenção Psicológica/efeitos dos fármacos , Estimulação Acústica/métodos , Adulto , Análise de Variância , Percepção Auditiva/efeitos dos fármacos , Depressores do Sistema Nervoso Central/análise , Depressores do Sistema Nervoso Central/sangue , Depressores do Sistema Nervoso Central/farmacologia , Cor , Percepção de Cores/efeitos dos fármacos , Relação Dose-Resposta a Droga , Etanol/análise , Etanol/sangue , Feminino , Humanos , Masculino , Estimulação Luminosa/métodos , Testes Psicológicos , Fatores Sexuais , Inquéritos e Questionários , Fatores de TempoRESUMO
Recall response durations were used to clarify processing in working-memory tasks. Experiment 1 examined children's performance in reading span, a task in which sentences were processed and the final word of each sentence was retained for subsequent recall. Experiment 2 examined the development of listening-, counting-, and digit-span task performance. Responses were much longer in the reading-and listening-span tasks than in the other span tasks, suggesting that participants in sentence-based span tasks take time to retrieve the semantic or linguistic structure as cues to recall of the sentence-final words. Response durations in working-memory tasks helped to predict academic skill and achievement, largely separate from the contributions of the memory spans themselves. Response durations thus are important in the interpretation of span task performance.
