The effect of low dose intravenous alcohol on human information processing.
A model of multiple-stage information processing predicts alcohol to have a selective effect on mechanisms involving central processing rather than sensory input. However, behavioral effects at low alcohol doses administered orally can be overshadowed by fluctuations in gastrointestinal absorption and metabolism rate. Paid volunteers, who therefore received intravenous doses of alcohol and a barbiturate, were tested on tasks varying in sensory discriminability and in central processing difficulty. The low drug doses did not affect errors of stimulus encoding but increased error rate in memory comparison tasks. These results confirmed the predictions based on the mutiple-stage model.
D000328:Adult; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000187:drug effects; D000431:Ethanol / Q000008:administration & dosage / Q000097:blood / Q000494:pharmacology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007275:Injections, Intravenous; D008297:Male; D009048:Motor Skills / Q000187:drug effects; D009622:Noise; D010919:Placebos; D013850:Thinking / Q000187:drug effects*; D013874:Thiopental / Q000494:pharmacology
D010919:Placebos; D000431:Ethanol; D013874:Thiopental