In nonalcoholic subjects, the latency of N2 reflected the difficulty of discrimination, being significantly delayed for the difficult compared with the easy discriminations. In contrast, alcoholics manifested similar N2 latencies regardless of discrimination difficulty. Moreover, the N2 latency in alcoholics occurred significantly later than in nonalcoholics for both the easy and difficult discriminations, suggesting that alcoholics find both discriminations more difficult and need more time for stimulus evaluation. Other researchers have reported similar delays in N2 latency in alcoholics in visual oddball tasks (Glenn et al. 1993).
