The effects of prenatal alcohol exposure on adolescent cognitive processing: A speed-accuracy tradeoff

A large literature of experimental animal research, clinical studies of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS), and prospective longitudinal human studies has established the causal role of alcohol in adverse offspring outcomes. The current paper presents an analysis of three tasks that evaluated aspects of cognitive processing from a 14-year follow-up of 462 adolescents in a population-based, longitudinal, prospective study. The adolescents had been exposed to a broad range of maternal drinking patterns before birth, most reflecting "social" levels of drinking. The three computer-administered tasks were the Nissen sequence learning task, a spatial-visual reasoning task, and an RSVP assessment of reading speed, memory, and comprehension. Partial Least Squares (PLS) analysis combined 13 measures of maternal drinking into a latent variable score for dose significantly related to a similarly computed cognitive processing latent variable combining 25 outcome measures. Alcohol-related deficits on the tasks were well summarized by a single new index: a speed-accuracy tradeoff on the spatial-visual reasoning task.