frontal control of reward-related striatal signals (i.e., increased frontal and decreased striatal activation) followed by depletion of frontal control processes resulting in unregulated reward signals (i.e., decreased frontal and decreased striatal activation). Such unstable control processes may underlie the differences in reward-driven drinking behavior observed across allelic groups. Such behavioral differences are indicated by literature implicating this polymorphism in alcohol-induced reward (Ramchandani et al., 2011; Ray and Hutchison, 2004; Ray et al., 2010) and craving (van den Wildenberg et al., 2007; Wiers et al., 2009) and with the notion that reward-driven drinking is subserved by ventral, but not dorsal, striatal pathways (Everitt and Robbins, 2005; Vollstadt-Klein et al., 2010).
