As recently reviewed by Jasinska and colleagues (2014), a number of factors influence neural responses to drug cues in addiction, including addiction severity, treatment status, drug availability, sensory modality and length of cue presentation, and implicit/explicit regulation of cue-reactivity (5). An important, yet seldom studied factor that may modulate neural responses to alcohol cues is the presence of a priming dose of alcohol. Early behavioral research suggests that alcohol priming increases the desire to drink (6, 7), and it has been argued that the disinhibitory effects of alcohol priming may be associated with subsequent loss of control over drinking (8). Very few fMRI studies to date have considered the role of alcohol priming in neural responses to alcohol cues. One such study tested a sample of ten hazardous drinkers (i.e., non-dependent, but frequent consumers of ≥4 alcoholic drinks per occasion for males, ≥3 drinks for females) using an olfactory cues task (i.e., alcoholic drink odors vs. appetitive/non-appetitive control odors) in a placebo-controlled design in which alcohol/saline was delivered intravenously to a target breath alcohol concentration (BrAC) of 0.05g/dl (9). The
