Alcohol and Recall: State-Dependent Effects in Man

Abstract

Male vollunteers performed four memory tasks either while sober or lunder effects of alcohol. Twenty-four hours later they were tested under the same or different conditions. In tasks measuiring recall and interference, learning transfer was better when the subject was intoxicated during both sessions than when he was intoxicated only during the learning session. In a task measuring recognition, transfer was not significantly affected by changing state. Thus, alcohol appears to produce "dissociated" or state-dependent effects in man, but not all forms of memory are equally sensitive to the phenomenon.

Alcoholic intoxication and memory storage dynamics

“…Furthermore, the present study replicates Goodwin et al (1969) in fmding no evidence for state-dependent retrieval using the recognition measure. The evidence for this is that there is no greater difference between the retention functions during the later test sessions than during the initial continuous session.…”

“…However, it is important to note that state-dependent retrieval has only been observed with recall measures of memory. Recognition measures of memory storage are considered to be independent of many types of retrieval interference, and recognition also appears to be free from state-dependent retrieval effects with both alcoholic intoxication (Goodwin et al, 1969), and thiopental sedation (Osborne, Bunker, Cooper, Frank, & Hilgard, 1967). Furthermore, even with recall, it is quite clear that there are frequently negative effects of alcohol on acquisition and/or storage, over and beyond the state-dependent retrieval effects (Goodwin et al, 1969;Overton, 1972).…”

Evidence against memorial facilitation and context-dependent memory effects through the chewing of gum

“…It is well documented that in addition to encoding of the to-be-remembered materials, the participant will also associate the context in which the item is learnt, with representation of that learning context at recall facilitating retrieval (e.g. Godden and Baddeley, 1975;Goodwin, Powell, Bremer, Hoine, and Stern, 1969;Miles and Hardman, 1996). In this instance, if the gum context has sufficiently changed, any context-consistent benefit will be lost.…”

Configuring of Extero- and Interoceptive Senses in Actions on Food

“…It was reasoned that choice between two cues could be dissociated from relative sizes of the two separate bouts if the direction of response to the conditioned cue depended on the state of the body and that modulating state did indeed change during consumption (Booth, 1972). State dependent learning had been clearly established (Goodwin et al, 1969;Overton, 1963) and so the initial experiments were interpreted within that framework. Nevertheless, combinations of stimuli had long been used in research into learning in animals (Rescorla & Wagner, 1972).…”