Purpose of Review

Alcohol and cannabis are the most commonly used substances during adolescence and are typically initiated during this sensitive neurodevelopmental period.

The aim of this review is to provide an overview of the most recent literature focused on understanding how these substances affect the developing brain.

Findings

The effects of alcohol use include:

• widespread decreases in gray matter volume and cortical thickness across time
• slowed white matter growth and poorer integrity
• disrupted network efficiency
• poorer impulse and attentional control, learning, memory...

Neuroscience and addiction research advances have been important for understanding the neurobiological changes that occur when a person transitions from recreational substance use to a substance use disorder or addiction. Addiction neurobiology is superbly situated to benefit from numerous developments in neuroscience.

Abstract

The ventral striatum (VS) is considered a key region that flexibly updates recent changes in reward values for habit learning. However, this update process may not serve to maintain learned habitual behaviours, which are insensitive to value changes. Here, using fMRI in humans and single-unit electrophysiology in macaque monkeys we report another role of the primate VS: that the value memory subserving habitual seeking is stably maintained in the VS. Days after object-value associative learning, human and monkey VS continue to show increased responses to previously rewarded objects...