However, until recently little was known about the neural processing underlying the low LR. Thus, our group has searched for brain features potentially related to LR using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We began with a study of drinking but non-alcohol dependent high school students, with results indicating that the lower the LRs the greater the prefrontal activation during a no-beverage high demand visual working memory (VWM) task above and beyond any effect of VWM performance across levels of LR (Tapert et al., 2004). Those results were corroborated in a second study with college drinkers, and expanded by including an alcohol administration session where LR-group differences diminished after a moderate alcohol dose (Paulus et al., 2006).
