The influence of alcohol and cognitive capacity on visual number judgements
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
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 accuracy, 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 performance 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.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 39-51 |
Number of pages | 13 |
Journal | Perception |
Volume | 50 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 14 Jan 2021 |
Documents
- Harvey & Seedhouse_R1_Perception.doc
Rights statement: Harvey A. J., Seedhouse M., Influence of Alcohol and Cognitive Capacity on Visual Number Judgements. Perception. 2021;50(1): 39-51. Copyright © 2020 The Author(s). DOI: 10.1177/0301006620984105.
Accepted author manuscript (Post-print), 629 KB, PDF document
Licence: CC BY-NC-ND
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