Because the population of studies that recruited non-treatment-seeking AUD groups was small and included both treatment-naive individuals and long-term abstinent individuals, generalizations about the importance of treatment-seeking status as a significant moderator of the ES distribution should be considered speculative. Yet this finding supports the assertion that treatment-seeking status marks an important distinction within the AUD population (Fein and Landman, 2005; Gazdzinski et al., 2008). A mere 15% of individuals with AUDs ever receive treatment (Hasin et al., 2007), raising questions about the generalizability of findings of neurobiological abnormality to the AUD population as a whole. Although treatment-seeking individuals with AUDs typically manifest impairment in attention, executive function, memory, and visuospatial abilities, a recent investigation of cognitive functioning in actively drinking, treatment-naïve individuals with alcohol dependence found no evidence of impairment on an extensive neuropsychological battery sensitive to the effects of alcohol abuse (Smith and Fein, 2010). Our finding of negligible WM effects in non-treatment-seeking samples, in contrast to substantial WM atrophy in treatment-seeking samples, is consistent with these differences in cognitive functioning. Because healthy WM is critical to normal
