Alcohol dependence has been shown to adversely affect numerous cognitive functions, including semantic processing (Williams and Rundell, 1984; Maylor et al., 1987; Ji et al., 1999). Relatively old and new neurophysiological studies have found abnormalities, such as decreased P3 amplitude in target detection tasks (Pfefferbaum et al., 1991; Porjesz and Begleiter, 1985; Porjesz and Begleiter, 1987; Prabhu et al., 2001), and in Go/NoGo tasks (Cohen et al., 1997; Kamarajan et al., 2005), decreased N2 and N2-P3 complex (Realmuto et al., 1993), and delayed latency for the N2 in a visual discrimination task in abstinent alcoholics (Porjesz et al., 1987). Further, the decreased P3 amplitude persisted after extended abstinence (Porjesz and Begleiter, 1987; Fein and Chang, 2006). These abnormalities observed in ERP components reveal general cognitive impairment in alcoholics (For a detailed review see Porjesz and Begleiter, 2003).
