Chronic alcoholics commonly exhibit mild to moderate deficits in selective components of cognition (Sullivan and Pfefferbaum 2005; Fein et al. 2006; Oscar-Berman and Marinkovic 2007). Despite such functional compromise, recent evidence suggests that alcoholics can perform certain otherwise impaired cognitive tasks at control levels by engaging compensatory processes (Pfefferbaum et al. 2001; De Rosa et al. 2004; Chanraud-Guillermo et al. 2009; Gilman et al. 2010). How these compensatory processes are invoked, however, remains unknown. A potential process in eliciting compensation is performance monitoring, which enables flexible actions in response to moment-to-moment changes in the environment that can result in conflict (Botvinick et al. 2001) or deviations from reward expectancies (Holroyd and Coles 2002) while performing a task. Detection of these unfavorable events is indexed by event-related potentials generated from the medial–frontal cortex (Falkenstein et al. 1991; Gehring et al. 1993; Botvinick et al. 2001; Holroyd and Coles 2002).
