Five experts respected for their significant contributions to the scientific literature on children of alcoholics (COA's) offer their perspectives in a panel discussion format. The panel members reflect on the historical roots of COA research and comment on its current status and future direction. Enriched by the panelists' variety of backgrounds, research interests, and approaches, the discussion emphasizes the need to consider multiple variables that influence the risk for alcoholism among COA's.

The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study^® is a 10-year longitudinal study of children recruited at ages 9 and 10. A battery of neuroimaging tasks are administered biennially to track neurodevelopment and identify individual differences in brain function. This study reports activation patterns from functional MRI (fMRI) tasks completed at baseline, which were designed to measure cognitive impulse control with a stop signal task (SST; N = 5,547), reward anticipation and receipt with a monetary incentive delay (MID) task (N = 6,657) and working memory and emotion reactivity with an emotional N-back (EN-back) task (N = 6,009). Further, we report the spatial reproducibility of activation patterns by assessing between-group vertex/voxelwise correlations of blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) activation. Analyses reveal robust brain activations that are consistent with the published literature, vary across fMRI tasks/contrasts and slightly correlate with individual behavioral performance on the tasks. These results establish the preadolescent brain function baseline, guide interpretation of cross-sectional analyses and will enable the investigation of longitudinal changes during adolescent development.