Ethanol, errors, and the speed–accuracy trade-off

Tiplady, B.; Drummond, Gordon B.; Cameron, Ewan A; Gray, Eve; Hendry, Jolyon H; Sinclair, W. A.; Wright, Peter

doi:10.1016/s0091-3057(01)00551-2

Cited by 28 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…It seems that in this case the task was relatively insensitive to changes in speed. However, the increases of error made in both parts of the task is in agreement with previous work indicating that errors may be particularly affected by ethanol (Dougherty et al, 1999;Tiplady et al, 2001).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 92%

Interactions between alcohol and caffeine in relation to psychomotor speed and accuracy

Mackay

Tiplady

Scholey

2002

Human Psychopharmacology

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Unlike other CNS depressants, alcohol intoxication can be associated with increased error rates, coupled with unaffected (or speeded) response rates during psychomotor and cognitive processing. The present study examined whether concurrent consumption of caffeine may differentially affect these aspects of alcohol and performance.A randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled design was utilised in which 64 healthy young volunteers received either 0.66 g/kg alcohol, caffeine (110-120 mg), both or neither. Performance was assessed using a four choice reaction time task (FCRT) with elements of repetitive (predictable) and random stimuli sequences and the digit symbol substitution task (DSST). Individuals on alcohol made significantly more errors during both fixed and random FCRT sequences, and there was evidence of weak antagonism of these effects by caffeine on the latter measure. On the DSST test of psychomotor speed, alcohol was associated with a significant slowing, the caffeine group were significantly faster and there was clear antagonism of the effects of alcohol by caffeine. These findings confirm that alcohol consumption is associated a greater number of errors and provide some evidence for task-specific antagonism of alcohol's cognitive effects by caffeine.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 92%

Interactions between alcohol and caffeine in relation to psychomotor speed and accuracy

Mackay

Tiplady

Scholey

2002

Human Psychopharmacology

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“…By contrast, alcohol tended to increase simple reaction times. Finally, caffeine had no effect on the semantic verification task, whereas alcohol increased error rates without affecting response times (consistent with findings that, in complex tasks, alcohol tends to conserve response speed at the expense of error rates, e.g., Tiplady et al 2001). …”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 82%

Dissociations between motor timing, motor coordination, and time perception after the administration of alcohol or caffeine

et al. 2008

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Rationale The impacts of psychoactive drugs on timing have usefully informed theories of timing and its substrates. Objectives The objectives of the study are to test the effects of alcohol and caffeine on the explicit timing involved in tapping with the implicit timing observed in the coordinated picking up of an object, and with the temporal discrimination. Materials and methods Participants in the "alcohol" experiment (N=16) received placebo, "low" (0.12 g/kg or 0.14 g/kg for women/men, respectively) or "high" (0.37 g/kg or 0.42 g/kg, respectively) doses of alcohol, and those in the "caffeine" experiment (N=16) received placebo, 200 or 400 mg caffeine. Time production variability was measured by repetitive tapping of specified intervals, and sources of variance attributable to central timer processes and peripheral motor implementation were dissociated. The explicit timing in tapping was compared with the implicit timing in the coordinated picking up of an object. Time perception was measured as discrimination thresholds for intervals of similar duration. Drug effects on reaction time were also measured. Results For tapping, alcohol significantly increased timer variability, but not motor variability; it did not affect coordination timing in the grip-lift task. Conversely, for time perception, the low dose of alcohol improved temporal discrimination. Caffeine produced no effects on any of the timing tasks, despite significantly reducing reaction times. Conclusions The effects of alcohol argue against a common clock process underlying time interval perception and production in the range below 1 s. In contrast to reaction time measures, time perception and time production appear relatively insensitive to caffeine.

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“…While errors may be very important in real-life tasks, the relative infrequency of their occurrence may lead to them being seen as less salient, and so more susceptible to impairment by ethanol. Tiplady et al (2001) tested this model by attempting to make errors more salient to volunteers using instructions that emphasized either speed or accuracy. The instructions affected the Top: total number of errors made during the task; centre: total number of errors correctly detected during the task; bottom: proportion of errors correctly detected.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of ethanol and promethazine on awareness of errors and judgements of performance

Acons¹,

Chan

Drummond³

et al. 2006

J Psychopharmacol

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Ethanol may affect detection and processing of errors in performance tasks, and thus influence the speed accuracy trade-off. In this double-blind study, 11 volunteers, (seven female, four male) took part in four sessions in which they received ethanol (Eth; mean blood alcohol concentration at 60 min: 87.3, SD: 18.4), placebo (Pla), promethazine 20mg (P20) and 30 mg (P30) in randomized order. A computerized four choice reaction time test (FCRT), other performance measures and visual analogue scales (VAS) were administered before dosing and at intervals up to 2.5h after. During the FCRT volunteers reported errors verbally. These reports were recorded together with error signals from the computer. The overall pattern of effects was as expected for Eth, with increases in errors for most tasks, and subjective drowsiness. P30 affected only the FCRT, and both P30 and P20 caused drowsiness. The number of errors made by the volunteers in the FCRT was significantly increased for both Eth (N 5.20, p 0.01) and P30 (N 3.81, p 0.01) compared to Pla (1.84) with no significant change in response speed. The proportion of errors detected was slightly but not significantly reduced (Pla 68%, Eth 63%, P30 57%). These results show that error processing is not significantly impaired by ethanol, and a reduction in awareness of errors cannot account for the increased errors which occur when performance is impaired by ethanol.

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Ethanol, errors, and the speed–accuracy trade-off

Cited by 28 publications

References 22 publications

Interactions between alcohol and caffeine in relation to psychomotor speed and accuracy

Interactions between alcohol and caffeine in relation to psychomotor speed and accuracy

Dissociations between motor timing, motor coordination, and time perception after the administration of alcohol or caffeine

Effects of ethanol and promethazine on awareness of errors and judgements of performance

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