Source monitoring in alcoholism

Recent research on the neural bases of source memory suggests that this type of memory is relevant to the neuropsychological assessment of neurobehavioral disorders. Source memory refers to the ability to discriminate the origin or source of information (e.g., did I think of the idea or did I read about it). We examined source monitoring in abstinent alcoholic patients (N = 53) and nonalcoholic controls (N = 34) and report significant impairments in the alcoholic patients' ability to remember the source of recently presented information. Decrements in source memory were uncorrelated with alcoholic patients' neuropsychological deficits on the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test or the Benton Facial Recognition Test. Using qualitative measures of brain CT scans in a subsample of 39 alcoholic patients, we found that source memory was correlated with Sylvian fissure ratings in the left hemisphere. We propose that source memory decrements are another area of neuropsychological functioning affected in chronic alcoholism. Tasks of source memory may offer the neuropsychologist a valuable new tool for evaluating cognitive functions in neurobehavioral disorders.