Sensory potentials are the voltage changes recorded in the brain in response to a sensory stimulus, representing the information flow along the pathway from the sense organ to the brain in response to an external stimulus, providing quantitative measures of the functional integrity of the sensory pathways (Zaher 2012). Chronic alcoholics have been reported to have prolonged latency in the auditory brainstem sensory potentials, fast time-locked potentials recorded at the scalp that represent processing along the auditory brainstem pathway (Begleiter et al. 1981; Chan et al. 1985; for a review, see Porjesz and Begleiter 1993). However, these abnormalities in early brainstem components recovered after a period of abstinence (Porjesz and Begleiter 1985) and were not found in HR individuals (Begleiter et al. 1987a), suggesting that they are related to the lifetime dose of alcohol consumption (Begleiter et al. 1987a; Nicolas et al. 1997). The P1 component of the ERP is a positive-going potential occurring around 100 ms after stimulus onset. P1 represents the basic perceptual processing of the stimulus (Heinze and Mangun 1995) and also is sensitive to various task
