In order to test the deleterious effects of chronic alcohol abuse on the intellectual capacities of alcohol-dependent individuals, tests of memory, impulsivity, risk, and attention are often employed. While individuals struggling with alcohol dependence rarely exhibit impairments on assessments of generalized intelligence, specialized complex tasks are uniquely able to elucidate potentially subtle difference between dependent and non-dependent populations. Estimates suggest that at least half of individuals diagnosed as alcohol-dependent are also cognitively challenged (4). One early study assessing a group of recently abstinent alcoholics, individuals with frontal lobe damage, and healthy controls found, as expected, no difference on assessments of IQ, but did report that alcoholic individuals were significantly impaired compared with both controls and individuals suffering from frontal lobe trauma in tasks that were designed to explicitly test frontal lobe function (72, 73). More recent studies have demonstrated explicit impairments on tasks, involving executive functioning (74, 75), working memory (76, 77), and impulsivity (76, 78–81). Structural abnormalities have been directly linked to frontal cortical function in within-subject experimental designs. One study measuring frontal cortical electrical activity (electroencephalogram recordings) during
