Alcohol and Recall: State-Dependent Effects in Man

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.