As alcohol and other substance use likely involves differential patterns of processing reward (Volkow & Baler, 2014) and incentive salience (Robinson & Berridge, 2008), fMRI-based cue-exposure paradigms have been used to study the immediate, implicit brain-based response of substance users to salient substance-related cues that trigger use. Within this context, substance users are typically shown a series of stimuli (e.g., images, words, scents; Monti et al., 1987; Stormark, Laberg, Nordby, & Hugdahl, 2000; Tapert et al., 2003) that contain the substance (e.g., an image of a can of beer) and a matched control (e.g., an image of a can of hairspray). Potentially representing a neurobiological phenotype (e.g., Claus, Feldstein Ewing, Filbey, Sabbineni, & Hutchison, 2011), imaging research suggests that AU adults show greater activity in the dorsal striatum, prefrontal areas (e.g. OFC), insula, anterior cingulate cortex, ventral tegmental area and nucleus accumbens as compared with non-AU adults (e.g., Claus et al., 2011; Tapert et al., 2003; Vollstädt-Klein et al., 2010).
