Premium
Effects of Chronic Alcoholism on Perception of Hierarchical Visual Stimuli
Author(s) -
Kramer Joel H.,
Blusewicz Matthew J.,
Robertson Lynn C.,
Preston Ken
Publication year - 1989
Publication title -
alcoholism: clinical and experimental research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.267
H-Index - 153
eISSN - 1530-0277
pISSN - 0145-6008
DOI - 10.1111/j.1530-0277.1989.tb00320.x
Subject(s) - psychology , chronic alcoholic , perception , similarity (geometry) , cognitive psychology , chronic alcoholism , visual perception , wechsler adult intelligence scale , visual processing , developmental psychology , audiology , cognition , neuroscience , medicine , artificial intelligence , computer science , image (mathematics)
Visuospatial processing in chronic alcoholism was investigated by asking subjects to make similarity judgements of hierarchically constructed visual stimuli. Comparison figures were similar to a standard figure at the global or local level. Alcoholics were less influenced by the global patterns in their similarity judgements than were controls. On the WAIS‐R Block Design subtest, alcoholics were also more likely than controls to distort the outer configuration of the design. Results indicate that alcoholism affects global processing on both experimental visuoperception tasks and on clinical measures of visuospatial ability. Implications for models of alcoholic dysfunction are discussed.