There is also evidence to suggest acute effects of alcohol on theta oscillations during various cognitive tasks in the visual modality. Moderate alcohol intoxication modulated event-related theta activity during visual word processing, although alcohol was shown to attenuate theta power overall (Marinkovic et al., 2012). Moderate alcohol consumption was particularly deleterious to semantic retrieval since it reduced theta oscillations for real words but not pseudowords. Event-related theta power was also associated with sources in left-lateralized frontotemporal areas, reflecting lexical-semantic retrieval processes. This finding is in agreement with previous studies that suggest that executive functions are especially vulnerable to alcohol intoxication. Task-related EEG changes were studied during the performance of a mental arithmetic task for low “social” alcohol dosages with the presumption that even social drinking may have detrimental effects. While no detrimental alcohol effect was seen on behavioral indices of task performance, there was an ethanol-induced attenuation of the task-related frontally dominant theta increase; this effect was modest (Boha et al., 2009). Alcohol dose had an activating effect on autonomic measures of heart rate and electrodermal activity, and changes in
