University of Portsmouth, UK.
Perception. 2021 Jan;50(1):39-51. doi: 10.1177/0301006620984105.
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.
我们使用枚举任务来解决急性酒精中毒是否会降低认知或感知能力的问题。为了控制认知资源的个体差异，我们记录了每个参与者的工作记忆容量（WMC）。预期酒精会损害枚举性能，无论是对小刺激集的自动平行计数，表明感知障碍，还是对大刺激集的受控计数或估计，表明认知障碍。在饮用伏特加饮料后，枚举的准确性总体下降，而对于小的集合，缺陷可以忽略不计，这与感知能力的丧失不一致。较高的 WMC 有助于对较大集合进行计数，并且在酒精条件下 WMC 与准确性之间的相关性更强，这表明低 WMC 参与者受饮料的影响更大。因此，我们的研究结果表明，酒精会降低认知能力，而不是感知能力。
