However, it is increasingly clear that the posterior cingulate area is part of the brain’s reward circuit, and critically involved in subjective reward value (Kable and Glimcher, 2007), reward receipt (Taylor et al., 2006), and reward choice (McClure et al., 2007; McCoy and Platt, 2005). Consistent with these findings, this area has been previously identified as responding to photographs of alcoholic beverages in adolescents with alcohol use disorders, and is an area in which activity from alcohol-related stimuli correlated with the number of drinks consumed per month (Tapert et al., 2003). Hermann et al. (2006) similarly found that activity in posterior cingulate induced by the visual images of alcoholic beverages discriminated between alcoholic patients and controls.
