A large and compelling experimental literature has documented the adverse impact of prenatal alcohol exposure on the developing brain of the offspring. This is the first report of adolescent attention/memory performance and its relationship with prenatal alcohol exposure in a population-based, longitudinal, prospective study (n = 462) involving substantial covariate control and "blind" examiner...

genetic epidemiological studies strongly suggest that additive and interactive genes, each with small effects, mediate the genetic vulnerability for schizophrenia. with the human genome working draft at hand, candidate gene (and ultimately large-scale genome-wide) association studies are gaining renewed interest in the effort to unravel the complex genetics of schizophrenia. linkage and fine ma...

Restricted and repetitive behaviors (RRBs) are hallmark symptoms of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs); however, it has proven difficult to understand the mechanisms underlying these behaviors. One hypothesis suggests that RRBs are the result of a core deficit in attention. Alternatively, abnormalities of the motor system may constitute the central mechanism underlying RRBs, given motor deficits ...

it has been estimated that more than 1.7 million individuals suffer a traumatic brain injury (tbi) each year. tbi causes secondary biochemical and metabolic changes which contribute to subsequent tissue damage and associated neuronal cell death. two early and delayed events occur after tbi, which results in neurological deficits. primary injury events include the mechanical damage that occur at...

Chronic prenatal exposure to ethanol can lead to a spectrum of teratogenic outcomes that are classified in humans as fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD). One of the most prevalent and persistent neurocognitive components of FASD is attention deficits, and it is now thought that these attention deficits differ from traditional attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in their quality ...

Unilateral spatial neglect is a common neurological syndrome following predominantly right hemisphere injuries and is characterized by both spatial and non-spatial deficits. Core spatial deficits involve mechanisms for saliency coding, spatial attention, and short-term memory and occur in conjunction with nonspatial deficits that involve reorienting, target detection, and arousal/vigilance. We ...

Previous research (LaPointe & Erickson, 1991) has shown that aphasic individuals have difficulty, relative to control subjects, in monitoring for spoken words while performing a secondary task. This finding may indicate that aphasics have fundamental deficits in attention or that their linguistic deficits are simply exacerbated by dividing attention. Twenty subjects, 10 nonfluent aphasic and 10...