Anosognosia for Memory Impairment in Addiction: Insights from Neuroimaging and Neuropsychological Assessment of Metamemory

In addiction, notably Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD), patients often have a tendency to fail to acknowledge the reality of the disease and to minimize the physical, psychological, and social difficulties attendant to chronic alcohol consumption. This lack of awareness can reduce the chances of initiating and maintaining sobriety. Presented here is a model focusing on compromised awareness in individuals with AUD of mild to moderate cognitive deficits, in particular, for episodic memory impairment—the ability to learn new information, such as recent personal experiences. Early in abstinence, alcoholics can be unaware of their memory deficits and overestimate their mnemonic capacities, which can be investigated with metamemory paradigms. Relevant neuropsychological and neuroimaging results considered suggest that the alcoholics’ impairment of awareness of their attenuated memory function can be a clinical manifestation explained mechanistically by neurobiological factors, including compromise of brain systems that result in a mild form of mnemonic anosognosia. Specifically, unawareness of memory impairment in AUD may result from a lack of personal knowledge updating attributable to damage in brain regions or connections supporting conscious recollection in episodic memory. Likely candidates are posterior parietal and medial frontal regions known to be integral part of the Default Mode Network (DMN) and the insula leading to an impaired switching mechanism between the DMN and the Central-Executive Control (i.e., Lateral Prefronto-Parietal) Network. The cognitive concepts and neural substrates noted for addictive disorders may also be relevant for problems in self-identification of functional impairment resulting from injury following war-related blast, sport-related concussion, and insidiously occurring dementia.