Further, since alcoholics do show anomalies in both neurophysiological and behavioral measures, the findings on the relationship between impulsivity and ERP factors suggest possible causal links: 1) both factors could be causally linked with each other, or 2) both could have been caused/linked by other common etiological factor(s). However, the claim for causal links may not be strong enough, considering the finding that no task-related performance variables showed a strong correlation with ERP factors, although the self-report measure (i.e. BIS) showed a high correlation with ERP factors. Although the lack of correlation between performance variables of impulsivity and ERP factors poses a difficult question, this can be possibly explained in two ways: 1) earlier studies on alcohol dependent individuals suggested that correlations between behavioral measures and self-report measures were weak, suggesting that they both tap into different aspects of impulsivity (for detail, see Dom et al. (2007), and 2) age as a factor could have moderated the performance-related impulsivity (more than the trait impulsivity) resulting in a differential effect of younger controls with higher impulsivity as equated with relatively lower
