The data are also consistent with our previous interpretation (Paulus et al., 2012) that the BOLD response contrasts might indicate that individuals with a low LR may need greater cognitive effort to recognize relatively subtle differences across stimuli. This increase of neural processing resources during effortful tasks when not exposed to alcohol might indicate that it is possible to identify individuals prone to low LRs to alcohol and consumption of higher alcohol quantities even before their first drink. As shown in Table 4, among the three ROIs that related to future adverse alcohol outcomes, for low LRs all three demonstrated the pattern of placebo values being greater than alcohol values while this was not true for any of the ROIs for high LRs.
