Of the 55 studies that used fMRI and whole-brain analyses to examine drug-related visual cues, 50 (91%) reported significant activity in the occipital lobe (primary and secondary visual cortices) during cue exposure. This drug-cued activity in occipital cortex was observed across multiple drug classes (alcohol, cocaine, marijuana, tobacco; Table 1) and there was no significant difference in frequency between the drug classes. Among the 28 studies that reported detailed results from a whole brain analysis of drug cues versus neutral cues in a substance abusing population, 24 (86%) reported significant drug-cued activity in the occipital cortex (Table 1, bottom, Table 2).
