Acute effects of triazolam on false recognition

Neuropsychological, neuroimaging, and electrophysiological techniques have been applied to the study of false recognition; however, psychopharmacologi cal techniques have not been applied. Benzodiazepine sedative/anxiolytic dr ugs produce memory deficits similar to those observed in organic amnesia an d may be useful tools for studying normal and abnormal memory mechanisms. T he present double-blind, placebo-controlled repeated measures study examine d the acute effects of orally administered triazolam (Halcion; 0.125 and 0. 25 mg/70 kg), a benzodiazepine hypnotic, on performance in the Deese (1959) /Roediger-McDermott (1995) false recognition paradigm in 24 healthy volunte ers. Paralleling previous demonstrations in amnesic patients, triazolam pro duced significant dose-related reductions in false recognition rates to non studied words associatively related to studied words, suggesting that false recognition relies on normal memory mechanisms impaired in benzodiazepine- induced amnesia. The results also suggested that relative to placebo, triaz olam reduced participants' reliance on memory for item-specific versus list -common semantic information and reduced participants' use of remember vers us know responses.