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Prenatal Alcohol Adolescents

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Mattson, S. N., Calarco, K. E., & Lang, A. R. (2006). Focused and shifting attention in children with heavy prenatal alcohol exposure. Neuropsychology, 20(3), 361-369. doi:10.1037/0894-4105.20.3.361
Question 1. Summarize the claims made by the authors regarding how humans develop over their life span

Prenatal exposure to heavy alcohol increases the probability of the child to have developmental problems. One of the main problems of fetal alcohol spectrum disorder is related to attention deficit. Children that were exposed to high doses of alcohol during pregnancy have lowest visual and auditory focus and take a longer time to change between visual and auditory attention. However, alcohol did not seem to have a significant impact on their …show more content…

Even if all three are criteria are required for the diagnosis of fetal alcohol syndrome, not all children that have been heavily exposed to prenatal alcohol present the three of them, meaning many will go misdiagnosed. In the present study, only 50% of the children that had been heavily exposed to alcohol during pregnancy presented all three characteristic criteria of fetal alcohol syndrome.
One of the typical CNS dysfunction problems of fetal alcohol syndrome is related to attention deficit. In this regard, children diagnosed with fetal alcohol syndrome and that had been exposed to high dosages of alcohol during pregnancy generally have lower coefficients of intelligence, present learning problems or are unable of correlating the visual signal to their surrounding environment.

Question 5. Describe the specific research designs used in foundational research

The study is based on the comparison of the visual and auditory attention of children. Children were divided into three groups:
- FASD: Children that had been exposed to high dosages of prenatal alcohol and that met all three criteria to be diagnosed with fetal alcohol syndrome
- FAS: Children that had been exposed to high dosages of prenatal alcohol but did not meet at least one of the criteria and could not be diagnosed with fetal

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