Learning to associate names and faces. Impaired acquisition on an ecologically relevant memory task by male alcoholics.

The performance of a group of detoxified male chronic alcoholics was compared with that of age-matched nonalcoholic controls on a memory task which at face value seemed relevant to daily life--i.e., learning to associate people's names with their faces. The alcoholics not only made more errors while learning the face-name associations than did the controls, but fewer of them were able to reach the learning criterion. However, 1 hour later, the alcoholics were nevertheless able to recognize all of the faces and names used during acquisition. The savings scores for the alcoholics, an index of the relative number of face-name associations retained during the 1-hour interval, did not differ significantly from those of the controls. These results demonstrate that the alcoholics' paired-associate learning deficit on this ecologically relevant task is related to their failure to form associations rather than to deficiencies in recognition memory or perceptual processes.