A CRITICAL REVIEW of “Relation of Prenatal Alcohol Exposure to Cognitive Processing Speed and Efficiency in Childhood”

ecently a growing body of literature has shown that individuals affected by fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD) show deficits in executive function (EF). 1,2 Executive function is a broad term used to describe a wide range of cognitive processes based in the frontal lobe involving deliberate actions such as planning, strategizing, inhibition, set-shifting, flexible thinking, and most critically, working memory (WM). Working memory is believed to be a particularly important component of EF, and individuals with FASD have shown deficits in tasks designed to assess WM.2 The authors of the current study believe that the observed WM deficits are mediated by deficits in cognitive processing speed. Their hypothesis is based on several studies demonstrating that fetal-alcohol affected individuals show greater retention times, or fixation times, in various cognitive tasks, thereby indicating slower processing speed.3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 The objective of the current study10 was to determine the degree to which processing speed deficits are found in later childhood in relation to prenatal alcohol exposure where mothers drank moderate-to-heavy levels of alcohol during pregnancy. The sample consisted of 337 black children from the Detroit Prenatal Alcohol Longitudinal Cohort, assessed at 7.5 years of age (interquartile range, 7.5 to 7.9).8 Mothers were recruited during their first prenatal visit betwee