Incidental Orienting Tasks and the Recall Performance of Acutely Intoxicated Subjects

An incidental-learning paradigm employing a semantic and phonetic orienting task was used to determine whether poor recall performance by intoxicated subjects is due to a storage deficit resulting from a superficial analysis of the presented materials. Forty-eight male, heavy social drinkers served as subjects. Both recall and latency measures closely replicated past research using similar orienting tasks. Intoxicated subjects did not differ significantly from sober subjects in the speed or accuracy with which they answered the orienting questions. Despite the apparent similarity in processing, intoxicated subjects consistently recalled fewer words. It was tentatively suggested that alcohol-induced retention deficits may be due to a reduction in breadth rather than depth of processing.