THE EFFECTS OF ALCOHOL ON PREPARATION FOR EXPECTED AND UNEXPECTED EVENTS

The present paper is concerned with investigating the effects of alcoh ol in situations where unexpected events occur and responses need to b e cancelled and reprogrammed. One experiment is reported which involve d the modification of an eight-choice reaction-time task, employing th e priming procedures of Posner to investigate the effects of alcohol o n decision times to expected and unexpected events. The experiment inv olved a series of valid pre-cues in which accurate information was pro vided about the up-coming response, and a series of invalid pre-cues i n which the ''wrong'' information was given to subjects. The effects o f alcohol (0.09% BAC) was significant on the invalid trials, in which reaction time slowed significantly and error rates increased significa ntly. The results are discussed in terms of response processing and at tention-switching.