The PFC has also long been known to be involved in the regulation of executive processes required to guide reward-based decision making (Krawczyk, 2002; Ridderinkhof et al., 2004; Bechara, 2005), and animal studies are beginning to shed light on the computational processes that underlie these decisions (Dalley et al., 2004; Fitoussi et al., 2015). Decisions to initiate (or suppress) reward-directed motor actions are encoded in frontal-parietal circuits (Andersen and Cui, 2009), and, in the PFC, the encoding of these actions is evident before action initiation indicating behavioral intent (Sakagami and Niki, 1994; Sakagami and Tsutsui, 1999; Tanji and Hoshi, 2001; Andersen and Cui, 2009; Momennejad and Haynes, 2013; Boulay et al., 2016). These data motivated our hypothesis that similar neurocomputational processes exist in the PFC that regulate alcohol intake decisions. The implications of identifying and understanding processes that underlie the intention to use alcohol cannot be overstated, because intention signals that arise before alcohol seeking/drinking may be particularly effective targets for interventions aimed at reducing or eliminating alcohol consumption.
