Ji. Tracy et Me. Bates, MODELS OF FUNCTIONAL-ORGANIZATION AS A METHOD FOR DETECTING COGNITIVEDEFICITS - DATA FROM A SAMPLE OF SOCIAL DRINKERS, Journal of studies on alcohol, 55(6), 1994, pp. 726-738
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
.