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Psychopharmacology (Berl). 1993;111(2):127-33. doi: 10.1007/BF02245513.

Testing the effects of hypnotics on memory via the telephone: fact or fiction?.

Psychopharmacology

J L Jackson, J W Louwerens, F Cnossen, H T de Jong

Affiliations

  1. Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Groningen, The Netherlands.

PMID: 7870942 DOI: 10.1007/BF02245513

Abstract

The two benzodiazapines used in this experiment, namely midazolam and flunitrazepam, have both been shown to have effects on memory processing in laboratory studies. In spite of the potential hazards involved in real life testing, it should be possible to replicate such findings in everyday environments and it is argued that a successful replication would be a very meaningful extension to the existing laboratory data. The present study was successful in producing significant "hangover" effects in healthy volunteers using a novel "user-friendly" telephone testing technique. Compared to placebo, the two hypnotics reduced speed of processing in tasks which required retrieval from long-term semantic memory (semantic verification) and the manipulation of material in working memory (syntactic reasoning). We suggest that this new method offers the potential for carrying out large-scale psychopharmacological studies with real patients and achieves a meaningful step forward in the search for ecological validity.

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