Trace anesthetic effects on perceptual, cognitive, and motor skills

Abstract

Forty male students were each exposed on 2 occasions to 4 hr of inhalation of either air or 500 ppm nitrous oxide with or without 15 ppm halothane in air. Immediately following exposure, a battery of tests of perceptual, cognitive and motor skills was administered. Compared with responses after breathing of air, those after exposure to nitrous oxide and halothane showed significant decrements in performances of a task in which attention was divided between auditory and visual signals, a visual tachistoscopic test, and memory tests involving digit span and recall of word pairs. Subjects exposed to nitrous oxide alone scored significantly lower on the digit span test only.