All inhibition studies (Norman et al., 2011; Wetherill, Castro, et al., 2013; Wetherill, Squeglia, et al., 2013) found that at baseline – prior to their initiation of alcohol consumption – future AU youth were less likely to engage task-relevant frontoparietal regions relevant to successful response inhibition, which could potentially reflect delayed maturation of these salient networks, as well as less ability to recruit these cognitive control networks. Notably, the two studies that also assessed follow-up behaviour (Wetherill, Castro, et al., 2013; Wetherill, Squeglia, et al., 2013) found an inverted pattern whereby, at the follow-up, youth who transitioned into alcohol use (AU youth) then showed relatively greater frontoparietal activation as compared with non-AU youth. This was interpreted as heavy drinking youth needing to allocate more resources to bring the requisite neural substrates on board to achieve the same inhibition performance as non-AU youth.
