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K C Mills

Publications and source records attributed to K C Mills.

24 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

The effect of low dose intravenous alcohol on human information processing.

A model of multiple-stage information processing predicts alcohol to have a selective effect on mechanisms involving central processing rather than sensory input. However, behavioral effects at low alcohol doses administered orally can be overshadowed by fluctuations in gastrointestinal absorption and metabolism rate. Paid volunteers, who therefore received intravenous doses of alcohol and a barbiturate, were tested on tasks varying in sensory discriminability and in central processing difficulty. The low drug doses did not affect errors of stimulus encoding but increased error rate in memory comparison tasks. These results confirmed the predictions based on the mutiple-stage model.

Adult↗

Shock induced ethanol consumption in rats.

Two experiments are presented which describe the temporal and volumetric changes in ethanol consumption by rats exposed to recurring schedules of inescapable random shock. The animals in Experiment 1, which had a choice between ethanol and water, increased their voluntary ethanol consumption immediately after the shock schedule. The postshock changes occurred with both 5% and 10% V/V ethanol, were specific to the presence of shock and were not reflected by measures of total daily ethanol intake. Experiment 2 exposed rats to extended 22 hr stress sessions, during which each animal had four simultaneous fluid choices available: water, saccharin 0.1% W/V, ethanol 5% V/V, and ethanol 10% V/V. Temporal intake patterns for both 5% and 10% ethanol showed pronounced peaks for the interval immediately following the shock schedule. A shift of intake from 5% to 10% ethanol was also demonstrated with increasing time under shock, while saccharin and water intake decreased. The results are interpreted as a relationship between voluntary ethanol intake and escape from the consequences of stress.

Alcohol Drinking↗