Using tasks adopted from nonhuman animal models (comparative neuropsychology) to test components of executive functioning in alcoholics, Oscar-Berman and colleagues have demonstrated deficits in working memory, problem solving, and susceptibility to interference (see Oscar-Berman and Bardenhagen, 1998, for review). Fernández-Serrano et al. (2010) administered conventional neuropsychological measures of fluency, analogical reasoning, interference, cognitive flexibility, decision-making, self-regulation, and working memory to alcoholics and other drug abusers and found that alcohol abuse was associated with verbal fluency and decision-making deficits. Several groups have reported that alcoholics performed significantly worse than nonalcoholic controls on the Trail Making Test, a measure of visual-conceptual abilities requiring divided attention, mental flexibility, set-shifting proficiency, and motor skills (e.g., Davies et al., 2005; Chanraud et al., 2007; Oscar-Berman et al., 2009; Loeber et al., 2010). Others have reported alcoholism-related impairments on the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (e.g., Sullivan et al., 1993; Ratti et al., 2002; Oscar-Berman et al., 2009), which measures abstract thinking, cognitive flexibility and shifting, concept identification, hypothesis generation, and sensitivity to feedback. Additional evidence of executive dysfunction in alcoholics has been reported as deficits on
