In terms of clinical applications, correlates of impulsivity may assume critical importance in identifying/establishing markers for the disorders. For example, impulsivity has been linked to externalizing traits/disorders in general and substance or alcohol use in particular [65-67]. As our results suggest that reward processing is related to impulsivity, specific electrophysiological signatures of impulsivity and/or reward processing may offer clues as to the neurocognitive underpinnings of these processes. For instance, among alcoholic patients, the scores on impulsivity and novelty-seeking were shown to be inversely correlated with P3 potential in a Go/NoGo task [68]. Previous work in our laboratory has shown that irrespective of diagnostic status, highly impulsive individuals had low visual P3 amplitude, while alcoholics in general had higher impulsivity scores than controls [69]. Further, it has also been demonstrated that alcoholics as well as children of alcoholics showed impaired response inhibition (and hence higher impulsivity) in ERPs as well as in event-related oscillations (ERO) [70-73]. Therefore, analysis both ERPs and EROs in error paradigms as well as in gambling tasks may be useful to differentiate people with high and low impulsivity in normals as well as in clinical groups.
