Based on the performance of patients with specific regions of brain damage unrelated to alcoholism (for example, damage from strokes, trauma, tumors, or other disease), researchers have gained a clearer understanding of which areas of the brain are important for different aspects of cognitive functioning. The cognitive deficits manifested in alcoholics correspond to those seen in patients whose brain damage is unrelated to alcoholism (see Parsons 1993). Researchers most often have connected the following regions of the brain with alcohol-related cognitive impairments and have developed models based on them: the right half or hemisphere (the right hemisphere model), cortical tissue diffusely distributed throughout both the left and right hemispheres (the diffuse brain dysfunction model), and the frontal lobe systems (the frontal lobe model).
