Executive Function and Alcohol Use: Precursors and Consequences

This project investigates both the cognitive precursors and consequences of alcohol use, and in doing so, will shed light on the motivational processes underlying this destructive and costly behavior. The collaborative effort between a clinical psychologist, Dr. Kassel, a cognitive scientist, Dr. Wiley, and Dr. Gonzales, a neuropsychologist, will afford the opportunity to better understand the interaction between cognitive factors and alcohol abuse from a transdisciplinary perspective. Indeed, investigation of cognitive profiles and abilities as possible behavioral risk factors has gone largely unexplored in the literature. The proposed research will specifically explore the relation between individual differences in cognition and chronic alcohol use by administering a battery of executive function (working memory and attention) tasks along with alcohol use instruments. Further, the proposed research will investigate the effects of alcohol use on cognition by administering alcohol and obtaining measures of executive functioning from the same battery subsequent to alcohol consumption. Although the cognitive consequences of alcohol use have begun to receive more study, the research to date only explored attentional changes in broad, mostly, atheoretical, strokes. The proposed battery of multiple instruments offers a fine-grained approach that will allow us to explore the precise cognitive mechanisms in terms of current cognitive theories of attention. Hence, incorporation of theoretically grounded and supported measures of cognitive processing into studies of human behavioral pharmacology will represent a significant advance in investigation of this topic. The findings from this study will be used to seed a future grant submission to either the National Institute on Drug Abuse or the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.