Although moderate alcohol consumption is known to degrade performance in a variety of tasks, the exact nature and extent of such impairments is not well understood. We examined alcohol effects on different levels of v...Although moderate alcohol consumption is known to degrade performance in a variety of tasks, the exact nature and extent of such impairments is not well understood. We examined alcohol effects on different levels of visual processing and oculomotor control. On the lowest level(automatic), reflexive responses were tested using the prosaccade task. The‘automated’level, incorporating routine behavior based on implicit learning, was studied using the double step paradigm, while the highest level, representing voluntary control, was examined with antisaccade and memory guided tasks. In addition, sentence reading was included as a prototypical complex task with high ecological validity. Participant′s baseline performance was compared to alcohol conditions with intoxication levels around 70mg% of breath alcohol concentration. Functioning on the automatic level was intact, except for a substantial slowing in saccade latencies. On the automated level, deficits in the ability to adaptively reprogram saccades on the basis of new information were found. Impairments in voluntary control were apparent in hypermetric saccade amplitudes whenever a reprogramming of the initial saccade target was necessary. There was also a small but significant detrimental effect on visuospatial short term memory. Somewhat surprisingly, no alcohol related deficits emerged with regard to inhibitory functions. ‘Reading under the influence’resulted in substantially prolonged fixation durations with only a modest increase in total viewing time per word. A trade-off between increased duration and decreased number of fixations pointed to the possibility that the extra time available under alcohol can be used for linguistic processing, which in itself did not appear to be impaired. This idea is supported by the fact that there was no interaction between alcohol and word frequency. Contrary to expectation, the processing of parafoveal information during reading was not impeded. Overall, results provide a largely coherent pattern of selective effects that begin to form a comprehensive picture of alcohol related deficits.展开更多
基金supported by a grant from the Alcoholic Beverage Medical Research Foundation
文摘Although moderate alcohol consumption is known to degrade performance in a variety of tasks, the exact nature and extent of such impairments is not well understood. We examined alcohol effects on different levels of visual processing and oculomotor control. On the lowest level(automatic), reflexive responses were tested using the prosaccade task. The‘automated’level, incorporating routine behavior based on implicit learning, was studied using the double step paradigm, while the highest level, representing voluntary control, was examined with antisaccade and memory guided tasks. In addition, sentence reading was included as a prototypical complex task with high ecological validity. Participant′s baseline performance was compared to alcohol conditions with intoxication levels around 70mg% of breath alcohol concentration. Functioning on the automatic level was intact, except for a substantial slowing in saccade latencies. On the automated level, deficits in the ability to adaptively reprogram saccades on the basis of new information were found. Impairments in voluntary control were apparent in hypermetric saccade amplitudes whenever a reprogramming of the initial saccade target was necessary. There was also a small but significant detrimental effect on visuospatial short term memory. Somewhat surprisingly, no alcohol related deficits emerged with regard to inhibitory functions. ‘Reading under the influence’resulted in substantially prolonged fixation durations with only a modest increase in total viewing time per word. A trade-off between increased duration and decreased number of fixations pointed to the possibility that the extra time available under alcohol can be used for linguistic processing, which in itself did not appear to be impaired. This idea is supported by the fact that there was no interaction between alcohol and word frequency. Contrary to expectation, the processing of parafoveal information during reading was not impeded. Overall, results provide a largely coherent pattern of selective effects that begin to form a comprehensive picture of alcohol related deficits.
