Component 5: Verney

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Fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD) affects over 1% of the population. FASD results in a wide array of neurocognitive deficits, which can in turn adversely affect social, educational, and developmental functions. Ethnic minority and low socioeconomic populations have a higher prevalence rate of FASD, and are therefore more adversely affected. However, the majority of research has been performed on Caucasians or using tests developed for Caucasian populations, which may introduce biases in the data. While this research has identified a number of brain systems and neurocognitive correlates to be affected in FASD, the underlying mechanism of these changes and impairments are still not well understood, and are even less well understood for the American Indian and other ethnic minority populations that are most affected. This understanding is necessary to develop treatments for this disorder. Here, we theorize that reduced efficiency of information processing underlies the wide array of cognitive deficits found in FASD. The purpose of this study is to investigate information processing efficiency using information processing tasks and psychophysiological, i.e., pupillary and eyetracking measures, in fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. We will study of the association of FASD and neurocognitive functioning in 20 children with FASD aged 10 to 17 years and 20 age-, gender-, and socio-economic- matched healthy control children without FASD. A battery of information processing tasks will be administered while simultaneously gathering pupillary response and eyetracking measures. New Mexico and the US Southwest are well represented with Hispanic, American Indian and lower socioeconomic populations. Therefore, we will assess cognitive functioning using information-processing tasks and psychophysiological measures that we have shown to be less influenced by culture, and will therefore provide a more accurate measure of processing efficiency in Hispanic and American Indian populations (Verney, Granholm, Marshall, Malcarne, & Saccuzzo, 2005). This study will undertake the following specific aims in children with FASD: 1) examine oculomotor efficiency, 2) estimate the efficiency of information processing, response inhibition and working memory performance on eyetracking tasks of anti-saccade and visually- and memory- guided saccade tasks, and 3) estimate the efficiency of processing with pupillary response indexing mental effort on tasks tapping early information processing mechanisms. The data from this study will be used to obtain extramural funding to further investigate the neurocognitive functioning with information processing and psychophysiological approached in a diverse sample to better address the health disparity issues in children with FASD. Relevance: The study involves unique methods to probe the early stages of human information processing and basic reflexes that are relatively unaffected by cultural and learning experiences. Therefore, these methods not only have the potential of uncovering the core characteristics of FASD at a fundamental level, but will also offer relatively culture-free assessment tools for other studies.