ABSTRACT
The use of reaction-time (RT) measures to make inferences about implicit cognitive operations underwent a resurgence in the 1970s due principally to Saul Sternberg’s exegesis of additive-factor logic and method. The additive-factor method is a technique for inferring the number and organization of cognitive operations from patterns of additivity and interaction between experimental factors. Errors were excluded from the principal analyses and error RTs were replaced with the mean of correct responses in that anova cell. In a meta-analysis of RT and error data, E. A. Maylor and P. M. A. Rabbitt have argued that alcohol globally slows performance and that alcohol-induced deficits are not usefully described as stage-specific: RT with alcohol on board is a constant multiplicative proportion of RT without alcohol. Errors percent is plotted on the abscissa of all figures. Alcohol significantly increased errors rates in the ascending blood alcohol concentration phase of all three tasks; misses increased sharply, while false alarm rates were unaffected by alcohol.
