Acute ethanol administration in humans has been shown to cause deficits in executive activities that are thought to require the PFC. For example, performance in a spatial recognition task and a planning task was decreased in social drinkers while inebriated (Weissenborn and Duka, 2003) and acute EtOH has been shown to cause poorer decision making using a gambling task to assess PFC function (George et al., 2005). Working memory (WM) tasks are also commonly used to test executive function given the role that the PFC has been shown to play in mediating this activity. However, the effects of acute EtOH on working memory performance in humans are mixed. One study observed alcohol-induced WM deficits in a backward digit span task only among those who demonstrated a high baseline WM performance when sober (Finn et al., 1999). The study that demonstrated deficits in a spatial recognition task (Weissenborn and Duka, 2003) failed to show a decrease in spatial WM performance in alcohol-exposed subjects, whereas impairments in a memory scanning task following acute ethanol challenge have been reported (Grattan-Miscio and Vogel-Sprott, 2005).
