Our work has primarily focused on characterizing alcohol consumption patterns, socialization with intoxicated peers and alcohol-induced changes in NAcc DA levels of adolescent and adult rats. Many questions regarding sensitivity to alcohol during adolescence still need to be addressed including how long do these age-related changes in behavioral and dopaminergic responsivity persist? Are changes in sensitivity to alcohol throughout development dependent on dose or exposure pattern? Does early alcohol exposure induce cognitive deficits that persist into adulthood such as changes in behavioral inhibition, decision-making, memory and attending to salient stimuli. Future experiments should utilize behavioral measures dependent on cortical activity such as the effects of chronic alcohol exposure on working memory, set-shifting, impulsivity and reversal learning. It would be interesting to explore whether alcohol use and/or dependency during adolescence exacerbates deficits in performance on cognitive tasks such as slowing the acquisition rate or by increasing the perserveration rate on a cortical-dependent task. While recently we have begun to examine sex differences in the impact of early ethanol exposure on behavior, future work should be extended to examine sex differences in
