Students who are serious about getting an education might want to cut down on their binge drinking sessions. A study of college students has found that binge drinking may affect their ability to remember new verbal information, or what is known as their verbal declarative memory.Binge drinking is consuming five or more drinking in one drinking session, a growing practice among college students in the U.S. and Europe.
Researchers studied 122 Spanish university students between 18 and 20 years old who were divided equally between those who did binge drink and those who did not. The participants were controlled for other variables such as intellectual levels, history of neurological or psychopathological disorders, other drug use (particularly marijuana use), or family history of alcoholism.
The students were given a series of visual and verbal memory tests.
Lower Ability to Learn
The main findings of the study included:
- Binge drinkers had a lower ability to learn new verbal information.
- Visual learning ability was not significantly affected.
- Women and men were equally affected by binge drinking.
"Our main finding was a clear association between binge drinking and a lower ability to learn new verbal information in healthy college students, even after controlling for other possible confounding variables," said lead researcher Maria Parada in a news release.
The researchers stopped short of concluding that binge drinking would affect the overall academic performance, but if their verbal learning ability is impaired, it would stand to reason that it would be possible.
More Neural Resources Needed
"Young adults with a binge drinking pattern of alcohol consumption who have poorer verbal declarative memory will need more neural resources to perform memory tasks and to learn new information, which probably would affect their academic performance," said researcher Rodríguez Alvarez.
The researchers plan to continue to follow the 122 students to determine how much their binge drinking habits affect their university experience.
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