Impairments in reflective cognitive functions in alcoholics: a neuropharmacological model

The ability to make use of reflective cognitive operations in monitoring and evaluating remembered events is impaired in subgroups of nominally cognitively unimpaired, detoxified alcoholics. Alcoholics, relative to controls, make more errors in identifying the source of remembered information (i.e. whether a remembered word was self-generated or was a stimulus word presented by the experimenter), and are impaired in their ability to inhibit confabulatory errors (intrusions). The cognitive-memory impairment expressed in benzodiazepine-treated normal volunteers mimics this impairment in alcoholics. Disturbances in prefrontal and frontal lobe functions may be involved in this selective impairment in cognition in many alcoholics and may also contribute to what accounts for the failures in reflective cognitive operations observed in amnestic patients.