A study on teenagers has shown that binge drinking in this age
group negatively affects girls more than it does boys,
especially in tests on working spatial memory. The study is a
joint endeavor between UC-San Diego and Stanford. It included 95
teenagers ranging in age from 16 to 19, 40 of whom were binge
drinkers, and defined “binge drinking” as four or more drinks
for a girl or five or more drinks for a boy. The adolescents
were given a series of spatial working memory tests, which they
performed in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)
machine so researchers could examine the cognitive effects of
the binge drinking on the brain. Spatial working memory, UC-San
Diego graduate student and lead author Lindsay Squeglia
explained, is the ability to remember “where things are in space
around you.” UC-San Diego psychiatry professor and co-author
Susan Tapert said that the tests the students performed were
similar to IQ tests, citing attention-testing tasks like
crossing out a specified letter, a “visual c