Effects of Drinking Patterns on Prospective Memory Performance in College Students Sharruna M Ramanathan PSYC 101 Ivy Tech Community College Background The topic of this research is The Effects of Drinking on Prospective Memory Performance in College Students. This research was done to test out the vulnerability of college students' brains in the aspect of prospective memory. Emerging adults (ages 17-20) tend to outperform adolescents (ages 13-16) on prospective memory tasks. In particular, jobs are high in self-initiated processing adolescents (ages 11-14 in this research). This improvement in prospective memory efficiency may be related to the development of controlled behavior in general. Thus, any factor that may influence the maturation of brain functions. This study shows how alcohol is one of the factors that influence the development of prospective memory. All the measures of the prospective memory have a delay between the encoding and retrieval of the coming task. The adolescent's hippocampus is also particularly vulnerable to heavy drinking, and alcohol effects on the hippocampus could also contribute to retrospective aspects of future memory failure. Heavy drinkers with a diagnosis of alcohol dependence have been found to perform more poorly on a measure of event-based prospective memory when compared to social drinkers. The main aim of this research is to determine the effect of drinking behavior on prospective memory functioning in college students. More specifically, the aims are to determine if heavy drinking, including binge drinking, has an effect on either time or event-based prospective memory and to determine if the frequency of blackouts has a relationship with time or event-based prospective memory.
Hypothesis
Social drinkers tend to be less impaired than heavy drinkers on prospective memory measures. Alcohol users who consume excessively show more errors on long-term, short-term, and internally cued prospective memory questionnaires, a self-report measure of prospective memory, and heavy users have been found to be 30% more likely to report compromised prospective memory abilities. Beyond this dose-dependent effect, chronic alcoholism appears to be associated with greater cognitive impairment than sporadic heavy alcohol consumption, although irregular alcohol consumption can be enough to provoke some degree of cognitive impairment.
Methods
There was a total of 123 3rd and 4th-year undergraduate college students (ages 19-23 years old). The participants received via email a link to a series of monthly online questionnaires. These college drinkers were divided into three different groups which were nondrinkers, light drinkers, and heavy drinkers. Under the nondrinker category, there were 23 females and 17 males; and under the light drinker's category, there were 30 females and 17 males; and lastly, under the heavy drinker's category, there were 13 females and 23 males. Initial recruiting was accomplished via sch...
