REPETITION AIDS LEARNING IN CHILDREN EXPOSED TO ALCOHOL PRE-BIRTH

The investigation confirms previous findings that children exposed to large amounts of alcohol before birth are less able than unexposed children to learn both verbal information, such as a list of words, and non-verbal information, such as a sequence of designs or sounds, report investigators Sarah N. Mattson, Ph.D., and Tresa M. Roebuck of San Diego State University.

Yet their findings, reported in the June issue of Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, also indicate that the alcohol-exposed children continue to learn each time the information is repeated, and that their ability to retain the learned information is not necessarily as impaired as previously believed.

"These findings have implications for learning remediation in alcohol-exposed children," Mattson notes. "[It] suggests that repeated learning trials will benefit alcohol-exposed children, allowing them to learn more … than if only one presentation is available."

As Mattson explains, children with heavy alcohol exposure before birth - even those who don't qualify for a diagnosis of fetal alcohol syndrome - have repeatedly been shown to both learn and retain less information. However, many of the techniques previously used to assess learning and memory abilities could not test the possibility that "deficits on … recall [in exposed children] reflect impoverished learning rather than deficits in memory, per se," Mattson notes.

Mattson and Roebuck recruited 35 children, aged 8 to 12, whose mothers had abused alcohol while pregnant; 19 of the children had fetal alcohol syndrome. The researchers also recruited a comparison group of 34 children with close-to-average intelligence whose mothers had consumed little or no alcohol during pregnancy. The comparison children resembled the alcohol-exposed children with respect to age, sex, ethnicity and socioeconomic status.

Every child completed five tests, measuring his or her ability to learn and recall non-verbal information (three tests) or verbal information (two tests). Each test presented the information to be learned not just once, but four or five times, with a performance assessment after each repetition.

Mattson reports that, as anticipated, "Alcohol-exposed children learned less information than controls for all tests examined," acquiring an average of 26 percent less verbal information and 28 percent less non-verbal information. In addition, the alcohol-exposed children generally tended to learn at a slower rate than their non-exposed peers did.

However, the findings revealed that the alcohol-exposed children benefited substantially when presented with the same verbal or non-verbal information several times, learning more with each successive trial.

This evidence that "children with prenatal alcohol exposure can encode new information when provided with repeated opportunities," she says, suggests that repeated learning opportunities should be part of their remedial education.

The investigators found that alcohol-exposed children were apparently as able as the comparison group to retain whatever verbal information they acquired. This, Mattson explains, suggests that the poorer verbal recall skills often seen in these children do not indicate memory deficits, as many other investigators have concluded, but instead reflect learning deficits.

Moreover, she notes, "[Children in] both groups retained a large absolute amount of non-verbal information," even though retention was lower in the alcohol-exposed children than in the non-exposed children.

Funding for the research was provided by a grant from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Health Behavior News Service: (202) 387-2829 or www.hbns.org.
Interviews: Contact Sarah N. Mattson, Ph.D., at (619) 594-7228 or smattson@sunstroke.sdsu.edu.
Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research: Contact Mary Newcomb at (317) 278-4765