Animal studies have also shown adolescents to be more sensitive than adults to alcohol-induced disruptions in brain plasticity indexed via the capacity to show adaptive increases in neuronal activation in response to prior neuronal stimulation--a form of plasticity termed “long-term potentiation” (Pyapali et al., 1999). Enhanced sensitivity to alcohol-induced memory impairments during adolescence has been seen not only in terms of performance differences between adolescent and adult rats in a spatial-memory task (Markwiese et al., 1998) but also in terms of performance differences between 21- to 24-year-old college students and individuals several years their senior (25 to 29 years of age) on both verbal and nonverbal memory tasks (Acheson et al., 1998).
