Chunk #21 — HOW DO NEURAL SIGNATURES ASSOCIATED WITH AUD HELP ELUCIDATE THE ROLE OF BRAIN FUNCTION IN THE RISK AND CONSEQUENCES OF ALCOHOL USE AND AUD ACROSS THE LIFESPAN?
affecting risk of developing AUD as well as allow for examining how social environment may moderate risk factors (further detail provided in Section 3.3). COGA was a pioneer in developing and implementing ERO methods to understand neural mechanisms underlying P300 and AUD. Investigating the EROs in the visual oddball task, our investigators were the first to demonstrate that the low amplitude P300 in AUD was due to lower activation of frontal theta EROs and posterior delta EROs. 35 Subsequently, COGA was the first to demonstrate that lower theta and delta EROs underlying P300 in the same task were more sensitive than P3 in discriminating between high‐risk and low‐risk offspring. 36 Thus, reduced activation of P300 and the associated frontal theta and posterior delta ERO measures of brain function during the oddball task are indicative of problems with attention, memory and decision‐making processes, preceding the development of AUD. These visual oddball task measures are obtained in all COGA participants, from its inception through the current Lifespan project and are considered to be the “core” phenotypes that can be used for analyses on the whole sample as well as in longitudinal analyses (>7000 participants have data at more than one timepoint). Examining
