In our earlier ERP study using the gambling task in controls (Kamarajan et al., 2009), we found that the maximum current density (i.e. the focus) involved specific brain regions: i) the ORN activity involved medial frontal (including anterior cingulate) areas during the loss conditions and medial posterior (including posterior cingulate) areas for the gain conditions in both males and females; ii) the ORP activity was concentrated at the medial frontal (including anterior cingulate) areas in females and at the medial posterior (including posterior cingulate) areas in males. This finding showed the importance of both anterior and posterior cingulate cortex for the processing of monetary outcomes. In this context, a weaker activation as indicated by decreased current density in the cingulate cortex in alcoholics during ORP processing (i.e. the awareness to loss/gain event) could either indicate a localized dysfunction in the particular region of anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) or a generalized malfunction in the entire neural network of reward processing (due to the central and influential role of ACC in the reward network). Further, our findings also showed that the cingulate
