Moderate drinking, which does not exceed more than 0.8 percent of alcohol content in blood, also the legal intoxication limit, can help in observing minor changes as compared to people who stay sober, reports Medical Xpress.
Researchers at the University of Illinois, Chicago conducted the study, which shows that moderately intoxicated participants were more likely to notice minor changes in shorter time intervals compared to sober participants.
The study included two sets of experiments which initially started with 48 males who were asked to go through a baseline test which aimed at making the drinking and non-drinking groups equal.
"Both the sober and drunk people find the same number of changes, but drunk people find them faster," said Jennifer Wiley, professor of psychology at UIC and senior author on the study.
Participants were divided into two groups and were shown an animated movie. While watching the movie, one group was given vodka and cranberry juice until the alcohol in the blood reached 0.8 percent, while the other group was sober. Later both the groups were challenged with a flicker paradigm with 8 rounds, Medical Xpress reports. Both the groups had to identify the changes they noticed during the rounds.
"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 explained the two strategies people use to find differences, according to the report.
The second strategy was not to focus but to just wait until a change pops out.
"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 was a complex task with more focused attention being needed. This was noted to be difficult for the intoxicated group because the experiment involved multi tasking such as remembering the sequence of letter or shapes and solve a math problem simultaneously, said the report.
"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."
Wiley said for a few tasks, like identifying the changes and creative problem-solving.
"You are sometimes better off not trying to direct yourself to find an answer," according to Medical Xpress.
The findings of the study are published in an online journal Consciousness and Cognition.
