Other studies report that alcoholics show impaired cognitive efficiency, with reduced ability to attend to relevant information while identifying and ignoring irrelevant information (Nixon et al. 1998). Response monitoring potentials are hypothesized to reflect the development of an internal representation of a correct response leading to a greater mismatch between the representation of correct and incorrect responses (Holroyd and Coles 2002). It is thus possible that enhanced performance monitoring could lead to increased cognitive efficiency, and that discrepancies in the literature regarding cognitive deficits in alcoholics may derive from the varying amount of influence that response monitoring processes have on specific tasks. For example, choice reaction time tasks with large response monitoring effects show little to no difference in performance between controls and alcoholics. By contrast, alcoholics may demonstrate impairment on more complex tasks such as the Sternberg task, in which response monitoring processes are less able to influence behavior.
