Planning abilities in alcoholics, process and reactive schizophrenics, and normals.

This study investigated planning abilities in alcoholics, process and reactive schizophrenics, and normals. Significant differences among the groups were found on all three planning tasks. Normals and alcoholics showed significantly greater planning ability on the picture arrangement task than the process schizophrenics. On the maze task, normals attained significantly higher scores than the process schizophrenics. On a task in which subjects predicted future effects from a present-day trend, alcoholics showed significantly greater planning ability than normals and process schizophrenics. Reactive schizophrenics did not differ significantly from any of the other groups on any task. The greater planning ability of the alcoholics in comparison with the normals on one of the tasks may be due to sampling and situational differences. The results suggest that deficits in planning abilities are temporary for alcoholics.