ABSTRACT
This review 1 is concerned with acute effects of alcohol on even related potentials (ERP) in social drinkers. Such effects may reveal alterations of information processing that are not necessarily seen in overt behaviour (Callaway, 1983). Clues from ERPs about the functional locus or loci of alcohol effects within the cognitive system are potentially valuable because as yet behavioural evidence alone has been inconclusive. For example, whereas moderate doses of alcohol usually slow reaction time (RT) (see for review Maylor and Rabbitt, 1993a) some studies did not find any effect (Pearson, 1968; Shillito et al., 1974; Tharp et al., 1974) or even reported performance improvements (Maylor et al., 1987; Wilkinson and Colquhoun, 1968). As pointed out by Maylor and Rabbitt (1993a), when alcohol effects are present, it is not clear whether they can be localized in particular sub-processes or stages of information processing. Maylor et al. (1992) even suggested that alcohol does not so much affect specific stages but rather leads to a general slowing of information processing in proportion to the complexity of the task.
