Cortical Maturation and ERPs in Cocaine-Exposed Children

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This application for a senior scientist award builds on over decade of work on studies of the impact of parental cocaine abuse during pregnancy on children's developing emotional regulatory and executive control functions in a longitudinal cohort of exposed and non-exposed children followed since birth. I have three goals for the period of this senior research award. First, I plan to devote these next five years to further developing and enhancing the newest component of our research laboratory, our high density event related potential lab and the application of this method to studying cortical maturation in cocaine-exposed children. This first goal seeks to extend promising preliminary findings regarding cortical functioning in prenatally cocaine exposed school-aged children participating in event related potential (ERP) studies. In the preliminary ERP studies that are the basis of my scientific plan and of a recently funded NIDA application (RO1 DA17863-01), ERP findings indicate that early exposure to cocaine may inhibit the specialization and streamlining of brain region involvement during cognitive processing such that task processing is slower to begin, requires more diverse cortical involvement, and requires more time to complete. Based on these findings, we propose to use ERP methods to assess with repeated visits at 11,12, & 13 years the 369 children participating in an ongoing longitudinal study (RO1 DA-06025) using three stimulus response experiments, the Stroop, a familiar-novel words paradigm, and a P300 traditional "odd-ball" paradigm. Research utilizing ERP methodology in children has demonstrated its potential in studying frontal maturation, and thus it may provide additional information necessary for clarifying the general and specific effects of prenatal cocaine exposure on cortical functioning and the developmental course of cognitive functions. Such information may then lead to better definition and treatment of these developmental problems. As the second goal of this senior scientist award, I will devote these next five years to developing my expertise in event related potentials as a neuroimaging technique and to designing appropriate paradigms for studying aspects of prefrontal cortical maturation in children from high-risk environments and biological risk conditions. Third, during this next phase of my laboratory development, I will further enhance the opportunities for pre-doctoral and post-doctoral fellows training in behavioral neuroscionce using resources of our high density ERP and neurophysiology laboratories.