Alcoholism is a complex disorder with multiple etiological pathways involving a host of genetic and environmental factors along with their interactions in its onset, manifestations, course, and treatment outcome. Converging evidence supports the notion that there may be a wide range of genetic, biological, neurocognitive and environmental factors involved in the causal pathways to develop alcoholism. Electrophysiological measures, such as electroencephalogram (EEG), event-related potentials (ERPs), and event-related oscillations (EROs) have played a vital role as biological markers or endophenotypes to understand neurocognitive mechanisms involved in alcohol use and related disorders (see Porjesz et al., 2005, for a review). These electrophysiological methods provide a direct measure of brain activity with high temporal sensitivity to understand neurocognitive processes, while being non-invasive and inexpensive for its applications. Specifically, ERPs can measure dynamically changing brain activity in real time during perceptual, motor, and cognitive processing while performing a task (Picton and Hillyard, 1988). ERPs have been widely and successfully used to examine neurocognitive processing during various experimental tasks in normal populations as well as in a range of clinical conditions including alcoholism (Porjesz and Begleiter, 1985; Begleiter and Porjesz, 1990a; Porjesz et al., 1996; Porjesz and Begleiter, 1997; Porjesz et al., 2005).
