585 research outputs found

    Improved memory for information learnt before alcohol use in social drinkers tested in a naturalistic setting

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    This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Springer Nature via the DOI in this record.Alcohol is known to facilitate memory if given after learning information in the laboratory; we aimed to investigate whether this effect can be found when alcohol is consumed in a naturalistic setting. Eighty-eight social drinkers were randomly allocated to either an alcohol self-dosing or a sober condition. The study assessed both retrograde facilitation and alcohol induced memory impairment using two independent tasks. In the retrograde task, participants learnt information in their own homes, and then consumed alcohol ad libitum. Participants then undertook an anterograde memory task, of alcohol impairment when intoxicated. Both memory tasks were completed again the following day. Mean amount of alcohol consumed was 82.59 grams over the evening. For the retrograde task, as predicted, both conditions exhibited similar performance on the memory task immediately following learning (before intoxication) yet performance was better when tested the morning after encoding in the alcohol condition only. The anterograde task did not reveal significant differences in memory performance post-drinking. Units of alcohol drunk were positively correlated with the amount of retrograde facilitation the following morning. These findings demonstrate the retrograde facilitation effect in a naturalistic setting, and found it to be related to the self-administered grams of alcohol.The study was funded by an MRC grant to CJAM (MR/L023032/1), we would like to thank all the participants for their time

    Mackintosh lecture: Association and cognition: two processes, one system

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    This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from SAGE Publications via the DOI in this record.There is another ORE record for this item: http://hdl.handle.net/10871/33264This paper argues that the dual-process position can be a useful first approximation when studying human mental life, but it cannot be the whole truth. Instead, we argue that cognition is built on association, in that associative processes provide the fundamental building blocks that enable propositional thought. One consequence of this position is to suggest that humans are able to learn associatively in a similar fashion to a rat or a pigeon, but another is that we must typically suppress the expression of basic associative learning in favour of rule-based computation. This stance conceptualizes us as capable of symbolic computation, but acknowledges that, given certain circumstances, we will learn associatively and, more importantly, be seen to do so. We present three types of evidence that support this position: The first is data on human Pavlovian conditioning that directly supports this view. The second is data taken from task switching experiments that provides convergent evidence for at least two modes of processing, one of which is automatic and carried out “in the background”. And the last suggests that when the output of propositional processes is uncertain, then the influence of associative processes on behaviour can manifest

    Refined Selmer equations for the thrice-punctured line in depth two

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    In [Kim05], Kim gave a new proof of Siegel's Theorem that there are only finitely many SS-integral points on PZ1{0,1,}\mathbb P^1_{\mathbb Z}\setminus\{0,1,\infty\}. One advantage of Kim's method is that it in principle allows one to actually find these points, but the calculations grow vastly more complicated as the size of SS increases. In this paper, we implement a refinement of Kim's method to explicitly compute various examples where SS has size 22 which has been introduced in [BD19]. In so doing, we exhibit new examples of a natural generalisation of a conjecture of Kim.Comment: 58 pages, comments welcom
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