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Biomedical subjects

I M Birnbaum

Publications and source records attributed to I M Birnbaum.

10 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1987

Is event frequency encoded automatically? The case of alcohol intoxication.

The four experiments reported show that sensitivity to event frequency is diminished by alcohol intoxication. In two experiments on confusion between presented and generated words, the function relating estimated to actual frequency was steeper for sober than intoxicated subjects. In two experiments on word-frequency estimates after a word-pronunciation task, the influence of alcohol intoxication was identified at the input as opposed to the test stage. We conclude that these findings are inconsistent with the idea that frequency-of-occurrence information is automatically encoded.

Adult↗
PubMed1983

Alcohol and sober mood state in female social drinkers.

The goals of the present study were to measure the relationship between alcohol consumption in 93 female social drinkers and their cognitive functioning and mood in the sober state, and to investigate the possible causal effects of alcohol consumption on these variables. In the first test session, a limited relationship was seen between previous alcohol consumption and sober cognitive performance. A strong relationship was found between alcohol consumption and self-reported depression and anger in the sober state. Either a prolonged reduction in alcohol consumption or a prolonged maintenance of alcohol consumption was undertaken by random subsets of the original sample. In the second test session 6 weeks later, women who had been randomly selected to reduce their alcohol intake showed decreases in depression, anger, and mental confusion when they were sober, relative to women who maintained or increased their alcohol consumption over the same period of time. We found no changes in cognitive performance in these groups. We concluded that the simplest explanation of the findings is that relatively low levels of alcohol consumption produce substantial increases in depression and anger in the sober state in female social drinkers. The value of considering alcohol consumption as a continuous variable rather than a dichotomous variable with "safe" and "unsafe" zones was discussed.

Adult↗
PubMed1980

Retrograde enhancement of human memory with alcohol.

In two experiments with normal male subjects, the ingestion of alcohol (1 ml/kg) immediately after learning significantly improved subsequent remembering. By comparison, marijuana (15 mg) had no significant post-acquisition effect. Facilitation of visual and verbal memory with alcohol under these conditions has implications for the interference and consolidation views of memory.

Adult↗
PubMed1980

Neuropsychologic decrements as a function of alcohol intake in male students.

Drinking history and sober neuropsychologic performance were examined in 45 male university students between the ages of 21 and 30 yr. Sober performance on the Shipley-Hartford Institute of Living Scale was significantly and inversely related to the amount of alcohol consumed per drinking event. Neither frequency of drinking nor lifetime alcohol consumption were significantly related to cognitive performance in controlled multiple regression equations. These findings emphasize the need for more information about the effects of social drinking on health.

Adult↗
PubMed1980

Alcohol and elaborative schemas for sentences.

Three experiments were conducted to determine whether alcohol-induced impairments of memory would be reduced by providing subjects with elaborative schemas. Anomalous sentences were presented to sober or intoxicated subjects either alone or with context words to facilitate comprehension. Memory was tested immediately with a yes-no recognition task. The results consistently showed that context words did not increase the number of hits in either sober or intoxicated subjects, and sober subjects made reliably more hits whether or not context words had been provided. The accuracy of recognition of distractors, however, was consistently improved by the presentation of context words, and was much more improved for intoxicated than for sober subjects. The results indicate that alcohol intoxication disrupted the production of elaborative schemas for understanding, but that intoxicated subjects were quite successful at utilizing such schemas as long as the schemas had been provided for them.

Adult↗