University Students’ Hangover May Affect Cognitive Research

Abstract

University students are the most employed category of participants in cognitive research. However, researchers cannot fully control what their participants do the night before the experiments (e.g., consumption of alcohol) and, unless the experiment specifically concerns the effects of alcohol consumption, they often do not ask about it. Despite previous studies demonstrating that alcohol consumption leads to decrements in next-day cognitive abilities, the potential confounding effect of hangover on the validity of cognitive research has never been addressed. To address this issue, in the present study, a test-retest design was used, with two groups of university students: at T0, one group was constituted by hungover participants, while the other group was constituted by non-hungover participants; at T1, both groups were re-tested in a non-hangover state. In particular, the tests used were two versions of a parity judgment task and an arithmetic verification task. The results highlight that: (a) the response times of university students experiencing a hangover are significantly slower than those of non-hangover students and (b) the response times of hungover students are slower than those of the same students when re-tested in a non-hangover state. Additionally, it was also observed that the prevalence of hungover students in the university campus varies depending on the day of the week, with a greater chance of enrolling hungover participants on specific days. In light of the latter result, the recruitment of university students as participants in cognitive experiments might lead researchers to erroneously attribute their results to the variables they are manipulating, ignoring the effects of the potential hangover state.

A systematic investigation reveals that Ishihara et al.’s (2008) STEARC effect only emerges when time is directly assessed

“…All of them received academic credits for their participation to the experiment. Before starting the experiment, all participants completed a questionnaire in which they reported their handedness, any vision or hearing impairment, and whether their psychophysiological state was affected by alcohol consumption or insufficient sleep in the last 24 h. One participant was left-handed; all of them reported to have normal hearing, normal or corrected to normal vision and that their psychophysiological state was not affected by alcohol consumption or insufficient sleep in the last 24 h 38 . All participants of this study signed a written informed consent before the beginning of the experiments.…”

Snarcing with a phone: The role of order in spatial-numerical associations is revealed by context and task demands.

“…They were all used to the left-to-right writing direction and were naive about the purpose of the study. All participants reported that their psychophysiological state was not affected by alcohol consumption or insufficient sleep in the last 24 hr (Murgia et al, 2020). Written informed consent was obtained before participation; the experiment was conducted in accordance with the ethical standards established by the Declaration of Helsinki and with the agreement of the University of Trieste Ethics Committee.…”

“…Like in Experiment 1, the sample size was determined using the same power analyses as for Experiment 1, and following the suggestions by Cipora and Wood (2017), we therefore recruited a number of participants considered “large” for this type of study. All participants reported that their psychophysiological state was not affected by alcohol consumption or insufficient sleep in the last 24 hr (Murgia et al, 2020).…”

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“…Magnitude classification is considered a “direct task”, because it requires participants to directly compare a feature of the stimuli relevant for the study (i.e., magnitude) with a reference. Conversely, parity judgement is considered an “indirect task”, because participants are asked to judge a feature of the stimuli irrelevant to the study, namely parity (Mingolo et al, 2021 ).…”