Executive functions are complex cognitive abilities requiring the synchronization of several sub-processes to achieve conscious and non-conscious goals (Alvarez and Emory, 2006). They control and regulate other abilities and behaviors and involve complicated mental skills that help us to connect past experiences with present actions, plan future behavior, organize, judge, change behavior and strategies, and remember details for our decision-making. Relevant skills include sustained and selective attention, working memory, planning, organization, problem solving, abstraction, and the ability to inhibit inappropriate responses. Intact executive functioning has been associated with integrity of frontal brain circuitry, which involves an overlapping and interconnected network. In alcoholics, the most compromised cortical areas of this network are dorsolateral prefrontal, ventral/orbitofrontal, and anterior cingulate regions. Although theorists differ on whether executive functions are unified with respect to process and component cognitive abilities (Lezak et al., 2012), there is abundant evidence that executive functioning is impaired in uncomplicated alcoholics, and that abnormal frontal brain circuitry is involved.
