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Verbal and nonverbal right hemisphere processing by chronic alcoholics
L S Cermak1, M Verfaellie, L Letourneau
1Memory Disorders Research Center, Boston University School of Medicine, Massachusetts.
Alcoholism, Clinical and Experimental Research
|October 1, 1989
Summary
Chronic alcoholism does not appear to cause a specific right hemisphere deficit. However, alcoholics show impaired cognitive functions, suggesting premature aging.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Cognitive Psychology
- Addiction Research
Background:
- The prevailing theory suggests chronic alcoholism leads to right hemisphere deficits, typically assessed via visuospatial tasks.
- This study investigates alternative cognitive functions beyond visuospatial abilities to examine the right hemisphere deficit theory in alcoholism.
Purpose of the Study:
- To test the hypothesis that chronic alcoholism results in a right hemisphere deficit using non-visuospatial tasks.
- To explore whether cognitive impairments in chronic alcoholics align with deficits observed in patients with right hemisphere damage.
- To evaluate the premature aging hypothesis in chronic alcoholics by comparing their performance to elderly controls.
Main Methods:
- Three tasks were administered to chronic alcoholics and patients with right hemisphere damage: inference from sentences, humor appreciation, and emotion recognition from faces.
- Performance of chronic alcoholics was compared to both patients with right hemisphere damage and healthy control groups.
Main Results:
- Chronic alcoholics' response patterns differed significantly from patients with right hemisphere damage across all three tasks, refuting the right hemisphere deficit theory.
- Alcoholics demonstrated significant impairments in sentence inference and humor appreciation compared to controls, but not in emotion recognition.
- The degree of impairment in alcoholics on the first two tasks was comparable to, and in one case exceeded, that of normal elderly controls.
Conclusions:
- The findings do not support the theory that chronic alcoholism selectively causes a right hemisphere deficit.
- Cognitive impairments observed in chronic alcoholics, particularly in inferential and humor processing, suggest a potential premature aging effect.
- Further research is warranted to elucidate the specific neurobiological mechanisms underlying cognitive deficits in chronic alcoholism.