Impaired skill learning in children with heavy prenatal alcohol exposure

Abstract

Global and widespread cognitive and behavioral dysfunctions have been documented in children with heavy prenatal alcohol exposure (CHPAE). In addition to further exploring explicit-memory functioning in this population, recent investigations have creatively looked into implicit-memory functions by testing the ability of CHPAE to perform priming (Mattson & Riley, 1999) or skill-learning (Carmichael Olson et al., 1998; Sampson et al., 1997) tasks. These empirical efforts have been supported by recent studies which have linked prenatal alcohol exposure to disproportionate volumetric reductions in subcortical structures such as the basal ganglia (Mattson et al., 1994) and cerebellum (Cavanagh et al., 1997), two structures that have been shown to be actively involved in implicit memory (Doyon et al., 1997, 1998; Heindel et al., 1989; Rauch et al., 1997). In each case, a profile of preserved implicit and impaired explicit-memory functioning has emerged. In the skill-learning domain, for example, participants were required to complete four blocks of 100 trials of the serial reaction time (SRT) task in which participants have to press the button which corresponds to the light that is illuminated, and in which there is an embedded sequence of ten positions that is repeatedly presented throughout blocks of trials. On the latter task, both studies indicated that CHPAE children tended to have longer mean response times than controls, but that their learning profile did not differ across the four blocks of trials.