THE EFFECTS OF PRENATAL ALCOHOL EXPOSURE ON ADOLESCENT COGNITIVE PROCESSING - A SPEED-ACCURACY TRADEOFF

A large literature of experimental animal research, clinical studies o f Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS), and prospective longitudinal human stu dies has established the causal role of alcohol in adverse offspring o utcomes. The current paper presents an analysis of three tasks that ev aluated aspects of cognitive processing from a 14-year follow-up of 46 2 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 learni ng task, a spatial-visual reasoning task, and an RSVP assessment of re ading speed, memory, and comprehension. Partial Least Squares (PLS) an alysis combined 13 measures of maternal drinking into a latent variabl e score for dose significantly related to a similarly computed cogniti ve processing latent variable combining 25 outcome measures. Alcohol-r elated deficits on the tasks were well summarized by a single new inde x: a speed-accuracy tradeoff on the spatial-visual reasoning task.