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Influence of Alcohol and Cognitive Capacity on Visual Number Judgements
We used an enumeration task to address the question of whether acute alcohol intoxication reduces cognitive or perceptual capacity. To control for individual differences in cognitive resources, we took a sober record of each participant’s working memory capacity (WMC). Alcohol was expected to impair...
Autores principales: | , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
SAGE Publications
2021
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7812515/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33446069 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0301006620984105 |
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author | Harvey, Alistair J. Seedhouse, Molly |
author_facet | Harvey, Alistair J. Seedhouse, Molly |
author_sort | Harvey, Alistair J. |
collection | PubMed |
description | We used an enumeration task to address the question of whether acute alcohol intoxication reduces cognitive or perceptual capacity. To control for individual differences in cognitive resources, we took a sober record of each participant’s working memory capacity (WMC). Alcohol was expected to impair enumeration performance, either for the automatic parallel counting of small stimulus sets indicating a perceptual impairment, or the controlled counting or estimating of larger sets indicating a cognitive impairment. Enumeration showed an overall decline in accuracy following a vodka beverage and the deficit was negligible for small sets, which is inconsistent with a loss of perceptual capacity. Having a higher WMC facilitated the enumeration of larger sets and the correlation between WMC and accuracy was stronger in the alcohol condition suggesting that low-WMC participants were more impaired by the beverage. Our findings therefore suggest that alcohol diminished cognitive rather than perceptual capacity. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-7812515 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2021 |
publisher | SAGE Publications |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-78125152021-01-26 Influence of Alcohol and Cognitive Capacity on Visual Number Judgements Harvey, Alistair J. Seedhouse, Molly Perception Articles We used an enumeration task to address the question of whether acute alcohol intoxication reduces cognitive or perceptual capacity. To control for individual differences in cognitive resources, we took a sober record of each participant’s working memory capacity (WMC). Alcohol was expected to impair enumeration performance, either for the automatic parallel counting of small stimulus sets indicating a perceptual impairment, or the controlled counting or estimating of larger sets indicating a cognitive impairment. Enumeration showed an overall decline in accuracy following a vodka beverage and the deficit was negligible for small sets, which is inconsistent with a loss of perceptual capacity. Having a higher WMC facilitated the enumeration of larger sets and the correlation between WMC and accuracy was stronger in the alcohol condition suggesting that low-WMC participants were more impaired by the beverage. Our findings therefore suggest that alcohol diminished cognitive rather than perceptual capacity. SAGE Publications 2021-01-14 2021-01 /pmc/articles/PMC7812515/ /pubmed/33446069 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0301006620984105 Text en © The Author(s) 2021 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). |
spellingShingle | Articles Harvey, Alistair J. Seedhouse, Molly Influence of Alcohol and Cognitive Capacity on Visual Number Judgements |
title | Influence of Alcohol and Cognitive Capacity on Visual Number Judgements |
title_full | Influence of Alcohol and Cognitive Capacity on Visual Number Judgements |
title_fullStr | Influence of Alcohol and Cognitive Capacity on Visual Number Judgements |
title_full_unstemmed | Influence of Alcohol and Cognitive Capacity on Visual Number Judgements |
title_short | Influence of Alcohol and Cognitive Capacity on Visual Number Judgements |
title_sort | influence of alcohol and cognitive capacity on visual number judgements |
topic | Articles |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7812515/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33446069 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0301006620984105 |
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