“…Here we only assessed the impact of optogenetic inhibition on Pavlovian alcohol-seeking in male rats. A rich prior literature, including our own work, has documented that female rodents, including Long Evans rats, consume more g/kg ethanol on average than male rodents, under both continuous and intermittent access conditions (Li and Lumeng, 1984;Lancaster and Spiegel, 1992;Juárez and De Tomasi, 1999;Priddy et al, 2017;Lorrai et al, 2019;Aguirre et al, 2020;Carpio et al, 2022;Armstrong et al, 2023). While we previously reported no significant sex differences in training trajectories or plateaus during both Pavlovian conditioning for alcohol and training with an alcohol discriminative stimulus (Carpio et al, 2022;Armstrong et al, 2023), it is possible that Pavlovian conditioned responses to alcohol cues in female rats may be differentially impacted by, or resistant to, peri-cue inhibition of the VP.…”