Damage To The Working Memory System Caused By The Abuse Of Ice

This paper mainly studied three questions:whether the abuse of Meth will cause the damage of working memory system, whether the Meth addicts will perform better in two different working memory tasks when presented with Meth related stimulus and whether the length of history of drug use will affect the level of memory system's damage. The subjects of our experiment are 20 Meth (Methyl-amphetamine) addicts who were picked from Jiangsu's drug rehabilitation center as subjects of the experiment. By using Meth related pictures and words as experiment material, we have tested the performance of Meth addicts in n-back working memory task and spatial position working memory task.The research consists of two experiments. The first one is an adapted n-back task which we change the original experiment material, replacing numbers and English letters with Chinese words. The results showed as follows:the accuracy of Meth abusers is significantly lower than normal subjects. When the task is less difficult, Meth abusers'reaction time to the words related to Meth is much longer than that to unrelated ones. But when the difficulty of the task increases, there are no significant difference. The second experiment uses Meth related pictures and unrelated pictures as the experiment stimuli to test the spatial position working memory of the subjects. The results showed as follows:compared with control group, Meth addicts have longer reaction time to Meth unrelated pictures, but the accuracy of Meth abusers and normal subjects are the same. Although spending a longer time processing the Meth related pictures, both of two groups have higher accuracy.