Schweinsburg et al. (2010). AU youth (defined as recent binge drinkers; n = 12; 2 females) and non-AU youth (non-drinkers; n = 12; 4 females), ages 16–18 years, completed a verbal encoding task (Eyler, Jeste, & Brown, 2008; Fleisher et al., 2005; Han et al., 2007), which required participants to memorize 16 word pairs before and during fMRI scanning. No significant group differences in performance were observed, although AU youth recalled marginally fewer words than non-AU youth, and nearly half of AU youth did not adequately recall the word pair list (<63% accuracy). Compared with non-AU youth, AU youth showed higher activity during encoding in several task-relevant areas, including the right superior frontal, bilateral posterior parietal cortical, and cingulate regions involved in working memory and verbal storage. AU youth also showed lower activity in task-relevant regions including the occipital cortex extending into the right parahippocampal gyrus and medial right precuneus (relevant for visual and linguistic processing, learning and memory). In addition, non-AU youth showed significant activation in the left hippocampus during novel encoding, whereas AU youth did not. The authors
