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Monday, August 10, 2009

Binge Drinking Affects Attentional and Visual Working Memory Processing in Young University Students
Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research Early View 10 Aug 2009

Binge Drinking (BD) typically involves heavy drinking over a short time, followed by a period of abstinence, and is common among young people, especially university students. Animal studies have demonstrated that this type of alcohol consumption causes brain damage, especially in the nonmature brain.
The aim of the present study was to determine how BD affects brain functioning in male and female university students, during the performance of a visual working memory task.

The results of this study confirm the presence of electrophysiological differences between young university student binge drinkers and controls during the execution of a visual task with a high working memory load. The larger N2 in the BD group suggests higher levels of attentional effort required by this group to perform the task adequately. The absence of any differences in the P3 component in the different conditions (matching and nonmatching stimuli) in the BD group suggests a deficiency in the electrophysiological differentiation between relevant and irrelevant information, which may reflect some impairment of working memory processes.


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