Metamemory Processing in Recovering Alcoholics

Previous research has shown that metamemory is not affected by alcohol consumption in non-alcoholics, but that it is affected in Korsakoff patients. In this study, recovering alcoholic, male Army personnel were administered the FACTRETRIEVAL2 program (Wilkinson & Nelson, 1984) to determine if recovering alcoholics would exhibit metamemory deficiencies as compared to non-alcoholic male, Army personnel. There was no suggestion in the data that these recovering alcoholics had any greater difficulty in retrieving general information from long-term memory, in recognizing answers to questions they had missed, or that they exhibited any metamemory deficiencies. Within the limits of this study, the metacognitive measures used found nothing to indicate differences in the accuracy of memory self-awareness of the alcoholic sample.