To the extent that adolescent sensitivity to alcohol use is in part biologically based and related to adolescent-typical neural characteristics that have to some extent been evolutionarily conserved across species, it might be expected that not only human adolescents but adolescents of other species as well would consume more alcohol per occasion, on average, than do adults. Under a variety of circumstances, they, in fact, do. For instance, in a simple model of adolescence in the rat, adolescents have often been found to voluntarily drink two to three times more alcohol than do adults (e.g., Doremus et al., 2005; Vetter et al., 2007; but see also Bell et al., 2006). Such basic science studies have shown that adolescent rats also differ from adults in their sensitivity to a variety of alcohol effects. However, as discussed below, whether adolescents are more or less sensitive to alcohol than are adults varies notably with the specific alcohol effect that is targeted.
