The key finding is that alcoholics had significantly lower amplitudes during outcome processing characterized by: i) markedly decreased ORP amplitude during all outcome conditions and ii) suppressed ORN amplitude during loss conditions (see Fig. 7). This decrease in amplitudes could be suggestive of a dysfunctional reward processing (system) in alcoholics. Further, deficits in both earlier (ORN/N2) and later (ORP/P3) components may also indicate that cognitive resources necessary for different levels of reward processing are impaired in alcoholics. It is well-known in the literature that alcoholics show deficits in N2 and P3 in a variety of cognitive tasks (Porjesz et al., 1987b, 1996, 2005a). However, it is still unclear whether the deficits observed in ORN and ORP components are reflective of generic cognitive deficits or a specific dysfunction in reward processing. Our previous findings from a single outcome gambling paradigm suggested that ORN and ORP could involve both evaluative/cognitive and emotional/affective processing (Kamarajan et al., 2009). Although it was argued that the ORN is functionally similar to the generic N2 component and does not have task-specific functions (Holroyd et al., 2008),
