News Archive

By Tobias Grey

Science Communication student

Most of us like a drink once in a while. We accept the consequences and enjoy the benefits - the buzz and relaxation - at the cost of your inhibitions and sometimes your good reputation.

We all seem to think we understand the costs of alcohol use, but an ongoing study on memory and alcohol use from UWA PhD student Helen Shield has begun to turn up some worrying findings.

The study's results imply that our memory may be affected by alcohol in ways that we didn't know, until now. The research concentrates on prospective memory - that is memory for things that you are going to do, and events in the future, or ‘future memory', if you will. The findings show that the implications may range as far as the way you organise work and deal with a large workload.

We know that alcohol impairs short-term memory, but Helen's study points to perhaps wider-ranging deficits in prospective memory associated with higher levels of alcohol use.

The experiment has been run with university students. They were subjected to a control task and two prospective memory tasks. The first task is the easier, a simple matter of deciding between words and non-words - so easy it's almost instinctual. The second task is more difficult, and involves thinking about the sounds that make up the word - it's considerably harder. Response time was used as a measure of effort for each of the tasks - the longer you took, the harder you had to think.

The participants were then given a questionnaire about alcohol use, which separated those who did not drink, or drank little, from those who drank often - bordering on a dependence or addiction problem. The effort was compared across both groups of participants, and hard and easy tasks, and things didn't look good for the heavy drinkers.

The results showed that people with alcohol dependence or abuse problems used the same amount of effort for both hard and easy tasks - putting too much effort into the easy task and vice versa. Helen believes that this shows inefficiency in the way the brain allocates attention and processing power to different tasks in high alcohol users.

"It's a totally new result - ground-breaking," Helen said, "and such a result in high-functioning individuals is an exciting and publishable result."

The results can also be of use to people recovering from an alcohol abuse or dependence problem, as it gives a framework for how to deal with stress, and arrange workload.

Published in UWA News , 23 July 2012