AN ANALYSIS OF COGNITIVE DEFICITS IN CHRONIC ALCOHOLICS

Abstract

Chronic alcoholics were administered the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test. It was found that those subjects who admitted to an alcoholism history of greater than 10 years were impaired at set persistence, set shifting, and error utilization relative to normal controls, while those subjects who described themselves as alcoholic for a period of less than 10 years were deficient in only set persistence. Neither group of alcoholics were impaired in their ability to identify simple concepts or in learning to learn capacity. The manifest behavioral deficits arc consistent with the anatomical and neurological evidence for a frontal-limbic focus of pathology in chronic alcoholism.