Clinically, the ability to change behavioral schemes and make better choices and decisions in life entails the coordination of many component processes of executive functions. Critical ones include attending, consolidating, and retrieving information about change. With respect to AUD, inhibition of automatic drinking habits would enable change toward favoring new healthy behaviors, to resist temptation and make better choices in the face of high-risk situations and selecting and planning a constellation of behavioral avoidance strategies according to different life situations. From a clinical perspective, when transitioning from excessive drinking to sobriety or controlled drinking, alcoholic patients make different decisions to implement new behavioral schemes to maintain their abstinence or reduce alcohol consumption. The tendency to choose short-term gratification at the expense of long-term consequences suggests that alcoholics may suffer from myopia for the future (Camchong et al., 2014; Le Berre et al., 2014). This ‘myopia’ may include patients’ awareness that the problems arise from their substance abuse and keep them in denial (Verdejo-Garcia and Perez-Garcia, 2008) or in a form of anosognosia (Le Berre and Sullivan, 2016) about their disorder.
