Social drinking and cognitive functioning in college students: a replication and reversibility study

The purposes of this study were to replicate a previous study of the relationship between alcohol consumption and cognitive functioning in college students and to investigate the reversibility of negative effects of social drinking on cognitive functioning when randomly assigned subjects abstained from drinking for 2 weeks. The previous study was replicated by administering the same battery of neuropsychological tests to 170 subjects (103 women) during the first testing session. Like the original study, the present study demonstrated several significant predicted inverse relationships between drinking and cognitive performance, but specific relationships between various drinking and cognitive variables were not replicated. As in the original study, some significant nonpredicted relationships also occurred. At the end of the first testing session, subjects were randomly assigned either to abstain from drinking or to maintain their usual drinking patterns for 2 weeks. They were then administered a different neuropsychological battery designed to assess functions similar to the original battery. Consumption the previous 2 weeks was significantly lower in the abstain group than in the maintain group, but there were no significant differences in the predicted direction between groups on the cognitive variables. Several significant predicted inverse correlations between drinking variables and cognitive performance occurred, but some nonpredicted relationships occurred also. Problems and implications for research in social drinking are discussed.