Search Here

Drinking alcohol could enhance your ability to detect subtle changes, according to a new study.

Researchers found that having a few drinks made people quicker at identifying minor changes in a visual scene compared to when they were stone cold sober.

A new study published in the journal Consciousness and Cognition found that in a "change blindness" test, intoxicated participants detected as many changes as sober participants and with shorter response times.

"Both the sober and drunk people find the same number of changes, but drunk people find them faster," senior study author Jennifer Wiley, professor of psychology at University of Illinois at Chicago said in a statement.

Researchers conducted two experiments.  The first involved 48 men were who were given a baseline task-set to make sure the drinking and non-drinking groups were equal before the experiment.

The alcohol group then watched a cartoon movie while drinking vodka and cranberry juice until they reached the legal intoxication limit at approximately .08 percent blood alcohol content.  The non-drinking control group also watched the same movie.

Researchers then tested all participants using a flicker paradigm, a test that goes back and forth between two versions of the same image with one small change. Participants repeated the test eight times. Participants were asked to say when they noticed an item change and identify it.

Researchers found that while participants were equally as good at noticing the changes, intoxicated participants were quicker at identifying them.

Researchers explained that people typically use one of two strategies to look for changes in the test.

"As western readers in the U.S., we usually start at the top-left corner and scan back and forth looking for anything that might be changing," Wiley said in a statement, describing one approach. The other approach is does not involve scanning, and rather than focusing attention, the person waits for the change to "pop out" at them.

"Our suspicion is that the sober people are using a more systematic, methodical strategy, and the drunk people are waiting for the 'pop out,'" Wiley said.

The second experiment, which required participants to use their working memory and attention, ended up being more difficult for the drinking group. In the experiment, participants were asked to remember sequences of letters or shapes while performing another task, like solving a math problem, at the same time.

"These tests require you to go back and forth between two tasks, which means you need to be directing your attention," Wiley said. "So there is a lot of updating, and a lot of back and forth. Drunk people are less able to do this, and they did 15 to 30 percent worse on these tasks."

Co-researcher Gregory Colflesh said that the latest findings "nicely supplement our previous research illustrating that moderate intoxication improved creativity."

In the previous study, researchers found that after intoxicated participants were better than sober participants at solving word association problems.

Researchers explained that for some tasks like change detection and creative problem solving, "you are sometimes better off not trying to direct yourself to find an answer."