Korsakoff and alcoholic subjects are severely impaired in animal tasks of associative memory.

Korsakoff subjects, members of the Alcoholics Anonymous, and alcoholics with 1 week or 5-6 months of abstinence were tested in a concurrent object discrimination task with 10 and 20 pairs of objects and compared to control subjects matched for age and education. The anonymous alcoholics were moderately Korsakoff subjects strongly impaired, whereas alcoholics with 1 week or 5-6 months abstinence performed similar to control subjects. The results are discussed with respect to current research on human amnesia and comparative neuropsychological topics.