MODELS OF FUNCTIONAL-ORGANIZATION AS A METHOD FOR DETECTING COGNITIVEDEFICITS - DATA FROM A SAMPLE OF SOCIAL DRINKERS

Literature on the cognitive deficits associated with social drinkers' chronic use of alcohol at moderate to heavy levels is equivocal. As an alternative to detecting impairment through measures of mean performa nce levels, the functional organization of cognitive skills in infrequ ent and heavy alcohol users was compared. Subjects (N = 364) were adol escent and young adult participants in a longitudinal study of health status and psychoactive substance use. LISREL was used to identify gro up invariance in the number and nature of cognitive components underly ing performance. Results showed that a model with three cognitive comp onents (general intelligence/abstraction, spatial relations/visual-mot or speed, and immediate memory) best represented performance in both i nfrequent use and heavy use groups. There were some group differences in the role of unspecified processing components, but no clear evidenc e for alcohol-related shifts in functional organization was found. The hypothesis of cognitive compensation, which highlights methodological problems in deficit-detection research, is evaluated with respect to the potential value of using changes in functional organization, that is, the latent structure of performance, to uncover the neurotoxic eff ects of alcohol or other drug use. More definitive tests of the compen sation hypothesis will require prospective, within-subject comparisons of functional organization in clinical as well as nonclinical samples .