By Dr. David Whitehouse
BBC News Online Science Editor
Simply the belief that you are drinking alcohol can impair judgement and dent memory, say researchers.
According to Seema Assefi and Maryanne Garry, two psychologists at Victoria University in New Zealand, memory can be affected by an alcohol placebo.
Tests showed that participants in an experiment who were told they were drinking vodka, but were not, were more swayed by misleading information and more certain their memory was correct than those who were told they were drinking tonic water.
Dr Garry says the research has given new insights into how human memory works and how both social and non-social influences can affect a person's recall of events.
"What we have done is that we have made people's memory worse by telling them that they were intoxicated even though they had drunken nothing stronger than plain flat tonic water with limes," he adds.
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