Alcohol and pharmacologically similar sedatives impair encoding and facilitate consolidation of both recollection and familiarity in episodic memory.

ABSTRACT: Alcohol and other pharmacologically similar sedatives (i.e., GABA_A positive allosteric modulators or PAMs) impair the encoding of new episodic memories but retroactively facilitate the consolidation of recently encoded memories. These effects are consistent for recollection (i.e., the retrieval of details) but some mixed results have been reported for familiarity (i.e., a feeling of knowing a stimulus was presented). Here, with dual-process models, we reanalyzed prior work testing the effects of GABA_A PAMs at encoding or consolidation. Contrary to previous conclusions, we show that GABA_A PAMs at encoding consistently impair both recollection and familiarity when an independence correction is applied to familiarity-based responses. These findings were furthe

SUBMITTER: Doss MK 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6309693 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Jul - Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature