In a more recent study, 33 alcohol-dependent (asdetermined by DSM-III-R criteria) adolescents aged 15 –16 years with more than 100 lifetime alcohol consumptionepisodes and without dependence on other substancesunderwent an extensive neuropsychological test battery.Compared to 24 control subjects, alcohol-dependent adolescentsdemonstrated significant differences in test performance.Protracted alcohol use was associated with poorerperformance on verbal and nonverbal retention in thecontext of intact learning and recognition discriminability.Recent alcohol withdrawal was associated with poorvisuospatial functioning, whereas the number of lifetimealcohol withdrawal episodes was associated with poorerretrieval of verbal and nonverbal information. The alcoholabusers scored worse on verbal skills, vocabulary, generalinformation, altered perception of spatial relationships,memory, recalling previously learned information, transferringinformation between different forms, and identifyinggroups of information that are related to each other inperformance-meaningful ways. Alcohol use had the greatestimpact on information recall, both verbal and nonverbal.The mental performance of alcohol-using adolescentswas 10% less than their nondrinking peers. Therefore,heavy drinking in early and middle adolescence leads tomeasurable deficits in the retrieval of verbal and nonverbalinformation and in visuospatial functioning