Implicit and explicit memory functioning in children with heavy prenatal alcohol exposure

Prenatal alcohol exposure is associated with widespread and devastating neu rodevelopmental deficits. Numerous reports have suggested memory deficits i n both humans and animals exposed prenatally to alcohol. However, the natur e of these memory deficits remains to be characterized. Recently children w ith fetal alcohol syndrome were shown to have learning and memory deficits on a verbal learning and memory measure that involved free recall and recog nition memory. The current study seeks to further characterize memory funct ioning in children with heavy prenatal alcohol exposure by evaluating primi ng performance. The choice of task is also relevant given previous studies of memory performance in patient groups with and without involvement of the basal ganglia, a group of structures known to be affected in fetal alcohol syndrome. Three groups were evaluated for lexical priming, free recall, re cognition memory, and verbal fluency: (1) children with heavy prenatal alco hol exposure; (2) children with Down syndrome; and (3) nonexposed controls. The children with Down syndrome showed significantly less priming than alc ohol-exposed children, who did not differ from controls. In addition, the a lcohol-exposed children were impaired on the free recall task but not on th e recognition memory task, whereas the children with Down syndrome performe d significantly worse than the alcohol-exposed group on both tasks. Finally , on the verbal fluency task, children with heavy prenatal alcohol exposure were impaired on both category and letter fluency, but the degree of impai rment was greater for letter fluency. These results further characterize th e memory deficits in children with heavy prenatal alcohol exposure suggesti ng that in spite of learning and, memory deficits, they are able to benefit from priming of verbal information.