Prenatal alcohol exposure alters error detection during simple arithmetic processing: An EEG study.

Abstract

BACKGROUND\nArithmetic is the domain of academic achievement most consistently related to prenatal alcohol exposure (PAE). Error detection, an important aspect of arithmetic processing, can be examined in a mathematical verification task. Electroencephalographic (EEG) studies using such tasks have shown bursts of synchronized theta-band activity in response to errors. We assessed this activity for error detection in adolescents with PAE and typically developing (TD) matched controls. We predicted that the PAE group would show smaller theta bursts during error detection and weaker responses depending on the size of the error discrepancy.\n\n\nMETHODS\nParticipants mothers were recruited during pregnancy and interviewed about their alcohol consumption using a timeline follow-back interview. Participants were followed from infancy and diagnosed for fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) or partial FAS (PFAS) by expert dysmorphologists. EEGs were recorded for 48 adolescents during a verification task, which required differentiation between correct/incorrect solutions to simple equations; incorrect solutions had small or large deviations from correct solutions.\n\n\nRESULTS\nPerformance was good-excellent. The PAE group showed lower accuracy than the TD group: accuracy was inversely related to diagnosis severity. TD and heavily exposed (HE) nonsyndromal groups showed the expected differentiation in theta-burst activity between correct/incorrect equations, but FAS/PFAS groups did not. Degree of impairment in brain response to errors reflected severity of diagnosis: HE group showed the same differentiation between correct/incorrect solutions as TD but failed to differentiate between levels of discrepancy; PFAS showed theta reactions only in response to large error discrepancies; FAS did not respond to small or large discrepancies.\n\n\nCONCLUSIONS\nArithmetical error-related theta activity is altered by PAE and can be used to distinguish between exposed and nonexposed individuals and within diagnostic groups, supporting the use of numerical and quantitative processing patterns to derive a neurocognitive profile that could facilitate diagnosis and treatment of fetal alcohol spectrum disorders.