Investigation of the use of video games to detect alcohol-impaired performance

The objective of the present study was to investigate the use of a video game task in comparison to _a pursuit tracking task for the purpose of· detecting alcohol impairment. To carry out this objective, the two tasks used in this study were compared for difficulty in Phase I. The conclusions from Phase I are: 1) that subjects selected higher RPM's to represent a higher level of difficulty, and 2) that the higher RPM's selected resulted in decreased performance compared to lower RPM's. Performance on the two tasks under various levels of BAC was then measured in Phase II. The general conclusions from Phase II are: 1) that performance of both tasks was significantly affected by BAC and Difficulty, and 2) that a greater decrement in performance due to BAC was observed for the video game task than for the pursuit tacking task. The results and implications of the two phases of research will be discussed further in the following two subsections.