In the search for biomarkers of alcoholism, ERO measures that index brain functions associated with stimulus processing are an attractive proposition, as they may provide complementary information to that of the ERP measures. For this reason, a number of studies on alcoholism have investigated ERO measures extracted from EEG data collected during the performance of stimulus processing tasks (Jones et al., 2006; Kamarajan et al., 2006; Kamarajan et al., 2004; Porjesz and Begleiter, 2003; Rangaswamy et al., 2007). Jones et al. (2006) conducted ERO analysis to compare adult male alcoholics and controls on a 3-condition visual target detection task. The same research group (Rangaswamy et al., 2007) applied this methodology to compare high risk vs. low-risk groups of adolescents, seeking trait (or endophenotypic) markers of the vulnerability to develop alcoholism.
