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The effects of acute alcohol intoxication on the cognitive mechanisms underlying false facial recognition
journal contribution
posted on 2016-04-06, 09:00 authored by Melissa F. Colloff, Heather FloweRationale
False face recognition rates are sometimes higher when faces are learned while under the influence of alcohol. Alcohol myopia theory (AMT) proposes that acute alcohol intoxication during face learning causes people to attend to only the most salient features of a face, impairing the encoding of less salient facial features. Yet, there is currently no direct evidence to support this claim.
Objectives
Our objective was to test whether acute alcohol intoxication impairs face learning by causing subjects to attend to a salient (i.e., distinctive) facial feature over other facial features, as per AMT.
Methods
We employed a balanced placebo design (N = 100). Subjects in the alcohol group were dosed to achieve a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) of 0.06 %, whereas the no alcohol group consumed tonic water. Alcohol expectancy was controlled. Subjects studied faces with or without a distinctive feature (e.g., scar, piercing). An old-new recognition test followed. Some of the test faces were “old” (i.e., previously studied), and some were “new” (i.e., not previously studied). We varied whether the new test faces had a previously studied distinctive feature versus other familiar characteristics.
Results
Intoxicated and sober recognition accuracy was comparable, but subjects in the alcohol group made more positive identifications overall compared to the no alcohol group.
Conclusions
The results are not in keeping with AMT. Rather, a more general cognitive mechanism appears to underlie false face recognition in intoxicated subjects. Specifically, acute alcohol intoxication during face learning results in more liberal choosing, perhaps because of an increased reliance on familiarity.
Funding
This project was funded by a grant from the ESRC [grant number: ES/J005169/1].
History
School
- Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences
Published in
PsychopharmacologyCitation
COLLOFF, M.F. and FLOWE, H.D., 2016. The effects of acute alcohol intoxication on the cognitive mechanisms underlying false facial recognition. Psychopharmacology, 233 (11), pp. 2139-2149.Publisher
Springer Verlag © The Author(s)Version
- VoR (Version of Record)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/Acceptance date
2016-03-01Publication date
2016Notes
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.ISSN
1432-2072Publisher version
Language
- en