Within the past 25 years, clinical and experimental observations of patients with and without KS have revealed many other neuropsychological dysfunctions associated with alcoholism. Alcoholics demonstrate poor attention to what is going on around them; need extra time to process visual information; have difficulty with abstraction, problem-solving, and learning new materials; exhibit emotional abnormalities and disinhibitions; and show reduced visuospatial abilities (i.e., the capacity to deal with objects in two-dimensional or three-dimensional space) (Parsons and Nixon 1993). The once-common view that alcoholics without Korsakoff’s syndrome are cognitively intact has been abandoned in light of accumulating evidence that cognitive impairments (and associated changes in brain structure) can occur in alcoholics who do not exhibit obvious clinical signs of anterograde amnesia (see Lishman 1990).
