Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2009, 6 2023 acquire differential responding during the more complex reversal-learning phase, whereas individuals meeting criteria for alcohol abuse were able to acquire CRs differentially during reversal. This indicates that more severe levels of alcoholism can lead to impairments in acquisition, particularly during more complex, demanding learning tasks. In selecting the neuropsychological test battery for this study, the domains of memory, executive function, and motor function were chosen based on empirically-driven hypotheses regarding neurologic sequela of alcoholism. The relation between neuropsychological test performance and drinking severity was supported by correlational analyses (see Table 4). Executive function (perseverative behavior on the verbal fluency task and speed and inhibition on the Stroop task) appeared to be particularly sensitive to measures of drinking severity. Memory function including verbal and visual immediate and delayed memory as well as facial recognition memory were related to multiple measures of drinking severity. Correlations between motor measures and drinking measures were expected given the documented effect of alcohol on the cerebellum, but were not observed in this small group of alcoholics. These findings vary somewhat from others in the literature. Sullivan [45,46] reported deficits in the domains of executive function (male alcoholics only), verbal and nonverbal working memory (female only), visuospatial function (male and female), and motor function (male and female) in abstinent alcoholics in her examination of neuropsychological function in a large group of male and female alcoholics. Sullivan and colleagues also document preserved declarative memory function [45,46] as well as recovery of short-term memory function with maintained sobriety [47] in alcoholics. However, findings of impaired memory performance in abstinent alcoholics are common (e.g., [48]. It is also important to note that only one measure of verbal memory was related to drinking severity in this sample. The preponderance of relationships between memory performance and severity of drinking were in the visual domain. Therefore these results may reflect relationships between drinking severity and visuospatial processing more than visual memory per se. This warrants further scrutiny in subsequent investigations. It is important to note that our abstinent alcoholic group may include individuals with less significant drinking histories than often studied (e.g., alcoholics with recent hospitalized detoxification). Our primary objective was to include a wide range of alcoholic profiles representative of alcoholism in a community setting. We attempted to avoid over-sampling a more severe subgroup of alcoholics such as those alcoholic individuals in clinical treatment settings [49]. Significant differences in EBCC learning were observed in this group, demonstrating that community-dwelling abstinent alcoholics have deficits in complex, nonoptimal classical conditioning learning paradigms. The relationship between neuropsychological test performance and measures of EBCC learning (see Table 5) supported the hypothesized neural circuit underlying the formation of new memory traces in classical conditioning of associative relationships. Specifically, we predicted that the cerebellar- thalamic-prefrontal cortex module, as defined by Weiss and Disterhoft [42], supported eyeblink associative learning in the discrimination reversal tasks. Neuropsychological test performance in the domain of motor function was most strongly related to EBCC learning performance. Given the known cerebellar contribution to EBCC, it was not surprising that a measure of motor function was correlated with discrimination learning. As anticipated, memory function as assessed by neuropsychological test performance was also correlated with EBCC measures. We also expected tasks of executive function to be related to EBCC learning, and particularly to the more complex task of reversal learning as