Here we report initial progress in this regard in three studies in which an EEG measure of the effect of a psychoactive substance during highly controlled repetitive cognitive testing in the lab was applied first to the more complex activity of operating an automobile driving simulator and then to a real world situation in which EEGs were recorded concurrently from 10 ambulatory people during a cocktail party. To establish feasibility, a strong effect was studied across increasingly naturalistic conditions, namely the acute neurophysiological response to alcohol [9]-[13]. An analytic method developed to measure drug effects by combining EEG and task performance measures into a single score [14] was adapted for use here on EEG measures by themselves. Different groups of subjects were used in the three studies to help assure that the findings were not idiosyncratic to the small groups of individuals studied.
