similar study, Ratti et al. (2002) found that alcoholics were impaired in both simple and choice reaction times. In the simple reaction time task, participants released or pressed a key when a target appeared. In the choice reaction time task, a stimulus could appear in one of three locations, and participants had to press a corresponding key. In both of these studies, the authors suggested that the motor response speeds themselves were not necessarily impaired, but the slower reaction times likely reflected reduced cognitive processing speed. In fact, some researchers have proposed that alcoholics are impaired in cognitive efficiency, that is, the ability to process information both quickly and accurately. In other words, alcoholics demonstrate a speed-accuracy trade-off, such that greater emphasis is placed on responding accurately at the expense of speed, leading to decrements in efficiency (Sullivan et al., 2002a). This conjecture appears confirmed by additional reports of deficits in reaction time, which have ranged from simple target-striking tasks (York and Biederman, 1991) to delays in identifying emotional expressions in facial stimuli (Maurage et al., 2008; Marinkovic et al., 2009; Fein et al., 2010), and performing executive functioning tasks (Pandey et al., 2012).
