Recent developmental findings have begun to elucidate the role of reward circuitry in the process of addiction. For instance, adolescents at high familial risk for alcohol use problems exhibit low DLPFC response during risky decision-making [53] and less VS response to reward [26], suggesting that altered prefrontal responding to reward could be an endophenotype present in those who are vulnerable to alcohol use problems before they have used alcohol. However, recent findings of the IMAGEN study indicate that the total contribution of response to reward in a set of reward-related neural regions (including PFC and VS) contributes only modestly to the initiation of alcohol use in early adolescence [54]. The authors of this study interpreted their findings as indicating that the function of reward circuitry contributes more importantly to the processes underlying the development of alcohol dependence than to those underlying the initiation of alcohol use. In distinction to our findings on altered frontostriatal connectivity, young adults at risk for alcohol dependence have been reported to exhibit altered functional connectivity between the accumbens and non-PFC regions such as the precuneus
