This project renewal proposal requests continued support for studies in three aspects of alcoholic Korsakoffs' and chronic alcoholics' cognitive processing impairments. The first component extends our search for the cognitive factors identifying alcoholic Korsakoffs' and non-Korsakoff chronic alcoholics' memory disorders. Our prior research has shown that alcoholic Korsakoff patients' amnesia stems largely from an inability to utilize features of verbal and/or visual information to store and retrieve information. We have shown that this is largely a problem on tasks involving explicit retrieval and less so on implicit retrieval. However, even on these latter tasks, difficulties exist when conceptual processes are evoked. Chronic alcoholics have been shown to suffer from a different pattern of difficulties less tied to initial processing and more linked to task difficulty. Our future research is designed to pursue these areas of analytic deficiency in the domains of an explicit and implicit conceptual memory. The second component seeks to pursue our exploration of the factors contributing to chronic alcoholics' deficits on delayed-classical conditioning acquisition. Converging evidence from animal and human literature implicates cerebellar involvement in this type of learning, so we intend to explore this possibility by also testing learning on a trace conditioning paradigm that relies more strongly on hippocampal involvement. In addition, heart-rate and GSR conditioning and extinction will be explored. Finally, we shall extend our thesis of possible cerebellar dysfunction in chronic alcoholics by exploring the status of brain functioning in this area utilizing an fMRI procedure. Both uptake during a contrast fMRI and a structural analysis of the cerebellum will be performed to determine the extent to which any dysfunction in this area might contribute to the patients' impaired acquisition during conditioning. Then, an fMRI targeting frontal activity during an encoding and a retrieval task will be performed to determine the extent to which these behavioral deficits can be visualized on-line.
