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). To try and reconcile these conflicting data, Saults and colleagues examined the effects of ethanol on different types of working memory tasks that varied in two dimensions of substrates that needed to be retained for completion of the task. These authors showed that consumption of alcohol impaired memory for auditory and visual sequences but not that for simultaneous presentations of auditory or visual stimuli (Saults et al., 2007). They concluded that ethanol impaired certain strategies for holding information online rather than causing a general decrease in the size of the working memory buffer.
