The first study to indicate that P3 amplitude is significantly reduced in boys at risk for alcoholism was undertaken 10 years ago (Begleiter et al. 1984). Subjects at risk were sons of alcoholic fathers; age-matched control subjects had no family history of alcohol problems. All subjects were between 7 and 13 years of age and did not drink alcohol. The task involved discrimination of rarely occurring easy and difficult visual stimuli representing greatly simplified views of a head from above. Further research has replicated these findings for both postpubescent (O’Connor et al. 1986) and prepubescent (Hill and Steinhauer 1993a) sons of alcoholics. Similar results have been obtained with other visual tasks (Whipple et al. 1988, 1991; Noble 1990; Berman et al. 1993; Porjesz and Begleiter 1990) as well as with an auditory task (Begleiter et al. 1987).
