Alcoholics, memories and self-delusion

Being an alcoholic is known to have a number of harmful effects on people's cognition and new research suggests that it damages people's memory without them being aware of it. Anne-Pascale Le Berre from the Universite de Caen/Basse-Normandie in France studied memory and people's awareness of it in a sample of 56 people, half of whom were alcoholics. The participants were given a memory test and also asked to predict their performance. The alcoholics did less well on the memory tests but had a tendency to overestimate their capacities, thinking that their memory was as effective as the healthy controls despite their worse performance.

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