processing at both early and late stages during word recognition (Marinkovic et al., 2004b). More specifically, the left-dominant N180 was attenuated by alcohol, suggesting deficient feature identification and prelexical pattern analysis. Conversely, the larger N450 under intoxication indicates increased difficulty in attempting to access semantic representations. While this evidence clearly suggests that acute intoxication affects visual word processing, the extant research in the semantic domain is exceedingly limited in scope and methodology and necessitates further investigation. Other lines of research on acute alcohol effects on cognition indicate that alcohol is particularly deleterious under the conditions demanding increased cognitive control, such as divided attention (Koelega, 1995), increased memory load (Paulus et al., 2006), and conflicting or ambiguous task demands (Marinkovic and Azma, 2010; Marinkovic et al., 2012).
