Effect of alcohol on recall and recognition as functions of processing levels

Other investigators have suggested that the memory impairments found in alcohol intoxication represent the failure to process information to sufficient depth, i.e., an encoding deficit. The present study employed different processing levels (semantic, phonemic and graphemic) in intentional-learning experiments to examine the effects of two different doses of alcohol on verbal free recall and recognition. Alcohol significantly impaired both recall and recognition. Guiding processing at information input with semantic orienting tasks and at retrieval with recognition testing improved the retention performance of both intoxicated subjects and controls administered a placebo. However, neither procedure corrected the relative decrement associated with the higher of the two doses of alcohol. Alcohol intoxication had no effect on the speed or accuracy of the initial encoding of items at any processing level. The results offer no support for the view that the verbal-retention deficits associated with alcohol intoxication are related either to the spontaneous failure to undertake deep semantic processing or to the inability to do so.