A review of the effect of alcohol hangover on attention and memory

Abstract

Alcohol hangover (AH) refers to adverse mental and physical symptoms after a heavy consumption of alcoholic drinks, which had a significant effect on socioeconomic development and drew a huge amount of interest among psychologists in recent years. Studies found that AH mainly affected peoples cognitive performances, especially memory and attention functioning, while the findings in this field were controversial. This paper aimed to review the articles and examine the effects of AH on attention and memory by focusing on their cognitive subdomains and different study designs to find explanations for their inconsistent results. The review article showed that among attention functioning, psychologists found consistent damaging effects of AH on selective attention and sustained attention behaviors whereas the effects of divided attention performance were inconsistent. Moreover, insufficient attentional resources were regarded as the mechanism of divided attention deficit during the AH state. Among studies of memory functioning, the encoding phase was believed to be a significant factor for impaired retrospective memory performance during the AH state compared with the retrieval phase, while the effect of the memory retrieval process was not clearly tested during AH. In addition, the AH state also negatively affected the prospective memory ability to implement behaviors at a specific future time or place. The distinct study methodologies (laboratory vs. naturalistic studies; within-subject vs. between-subject design; student vs. non-student sample) were suggested to be the contributors to these conflicting results.