It is important in this context to distinguish binge drinking from alcohol dependence. For example, alcohol dependent individuals who did binge drink—that is, regularly consumed more than 10 successive drinks—were compared with an alcohol dependent group who did not binge drink. No differences in performance were found for visuo-motor speed, visuo-spatial organization/planning, learning, proactive/retroactive interference, and item retrieval efficiency (Kokavec & Crowe, 1999). Comparable executive functioning results were obtained for both groups, and binge drinkers performed better than nonbinge drinkers on memory tasks. Although binge drinking was associated with impaired performance on immediate and delayed recall of verbal and visual information (Wechsler Memory Scale–Revised), retrieval ability was similar so that semantic organizational ability may be superior in binge compared with nonbinge drinkers. The pattern of binge versus nonbinge findings is likely affected by the inclusion of alcohol dependence criteria and the disproportionate number of drinks required in the binge definition.
