In summary, this study examined EFE processing in LTAA vs. age and gender comparable NAC. It shows P160 latency delays during gender identification and emotion identification tasks, and RT delays during the emotion identification task only. The RT delays were not independent of the P160 delays. In contrast, the P160 delays were, for the most part, independent of the RT results, with large effects remaining after removing shared variance with RT. Moreover, the P160 latency effects were over 5 times the size of the RT effects. The current data show that slower processing of EFE stimuli in alcoholics is present after at least 6 years of abstinence. RT and accuracy task effects were present, but did not differ between alcoholics and controls. The finding of a latency delay in alcoholics indicates inefficiency in early face processing in alcoholics. Behavioral differences across tasks likely result from down-stream processing differences between tasks due to task saliency and attention. Differences between groups in these effects might be elicited by more intense and varied EFE stimuli or more difficult task conditions (e.g., using degraded
