英国研究人员最近报告说，青少年如果经常酗酒，其记忆力会受到损害，特别是在记住预先计划的某件事情方面，酗酒青少年的记忆力与同龄人相比较低。
英国诺森布里亚大学日前发布的研究报告指出，该校研究人员测试了50名青年学生在前瞻记忆上的差别。前瞻记忆是指对预计要做的事情的记忆，比如记住到时间去看牙医或按时缴纳某些费用。这些学生中有29人不常饮酒，其余21人却经常酗酒，比如每次喝6品脱（约3.4升）啤酒，每周这样喝两次以上。
研究人员给这些学生看一段关于市中心购物区的录像，并要求他们在看到特定地方时就去完成一些预先设定的任务。结果发现，那些经常酗酒的学生能够记住并完成的任务比不常饮酒的同龄人明显要少。由于所有人在受试前４８小时内都没有饮酒，因此这一结果说明，经常酗酒损害了一些学生的前瞻记忆能力。
领导这个研究的赫弗南博士说，青少年的大脑还没有完全发育成熟，长期酗酒可能损害仍在成长的大脑，影响认知和记忆等功能。尤其需要警惕的是这项研究还显示，许多经常酗酒的青少年并没有感觉到其前瞻记忆力下降，没有给予足够重视。
赫弗南认为，对仍在发育的年轻人来说，很难为他们划出一条酒量“安全线”，因此青少年应该尽量少饮酒。
推荐原文出处：
Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research DOI：10.1111/j.1530-0277.2009.01025.x
Binge Drinking Affects Attentional and Visual Working Memory Processing in Young University Students
Alberto Crego, Socorro Rodriguez Holguín, María Parada, Nayara Mota, Montserrat Corral, and Fernando Cadaveira
From the Department of Clinical Psychology and Psychobiology, University of Santiago de Compostela, Galicia, Spain.
Background: Binge Drinking (BD) typically involves heavy drinking over a short time, followed by a period of abstinence, and is common among young people, especially university students. Animal studies have demonstrated that this type of alcohol consumption causes brain damage, especially in the nonmature brain. The aim of the present study was to determine how BD affects brain functioning in male and female university students, during the performance of a visual working memory task.
Methods: Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded, with an extensive set of 32 scalp electrodes, in 95 first-year university students (age range 18 to 20 years), comprising 42 binge drinkers (BD) and 53 controls, in a visual "identical pairs" continuous performance task. Principal components analysis was used to identify and analyze the N2 (negative waveform with a latency around 200 to 300 ms related to attentional processes) and P3 (positive waveform with a latency around 300 to 600 ms related to working memory processes) components of the ERPs.
Results: In the matching condition of the task, the N2 component in central and parietal regions was significantly larger in the BD than in the control group. In the control group, the P3 component was larger in the matching than in the nonmatching condition in the frontal, central, and parietal regions, whereas the BD group did not show any significant differences between conditions in any region.
Conclusions: The results of this study confirm the presence of electrophysiological differences between young university student binge drinkers and controls during the execution of a visual task with a high working memory load. The larger N2 in the BD group suggests higher levels of attentional effort required by this group to perform the task adequately. The absence of any differences in the P3 component in the different conditions (matching and nonmatching stimuli) in the BD group suggests a deficiency in the electrophysiological differentiation between relevant and irrelevant information, which may reflect some impairment of working memory processes.
