[Effects of acute mild and moderate hypoxia on human short memory].

OBJECTIVE

To investigate the effects of acute mild and moderate hypoxia on human short memory.

METHOD

Tests of pattern memory, scanning memory, continuous recognition memory and space memory were conducted on 18 healthy young male subjects during exposure to 300 m (control), 2800 m, 3600 m and 4400 m altitude in hypobaric chamber.

RESULT

Compared to control group, only the performance of continous recognition memory decreased significantly after exposure to 2800 in for 1 h(P < 0. 05); total reaction time in all tests increased significantly (P < 0.0 1) and performance decreased after exposure to 3600 in for 1 h, but the error rates in memory scanning and space memory test were unchanged (P > 0.05); during exposure to 4400 in performance of all tests decreased further to about 90.4%, 93.7%, 83.3% and 80.7% of the control values (P < 0.01), respectively,and error rate increased significantly too (P < 0.05).

CONCLUSION

Performance of human short memory decreased after exposure to acute mild and moderate hypoxia for 1 h, and these effects were aggravated with the increase of altitude. Characteristic and threshold of the effect on the various performance tests were different, but increase of reaction time was the first to appear in all cases.