Grant: CIHR New Investigator

Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) leads to physical, mental, behavioral, and learning disabilities as a result of prenatal alcohol exposure. Children with FASD have difficulties with executive functions (EF) including planning, thinking flexibly, problem solving, and working memory (cool EF) as well as tasks involving emotion and decision making (hot EF). Individuals with FASD also display adverse outcomes including behavior problems, mental health issues, delinquency, and substance abuse, as well as problems adaptive to society. The goals of the proposed project are to examine: 1) the pattern of hot and cool EF difficulties in children and adolescents with FASD compared to control children 2) how both hot and cool EF contribute to adverse outcomes; 3) whether EF can be improved with targeted cognitive interventions. Participants will include children and adolescents (aged 11 to 17 years) with FASD and non-exposed controls. They will complete tests of cool and hot EF and their parents/caregivers will complete various rating scales regarding the participants behavior. Next, two groups of children with FASD will receive a targeted intervention: one focused on working memory and one focused on self-regulation, the third group will serve as a waitlist control. We hypothesize that children with FASD will have deficits in both hot and cool EF, but that they will have greater impairment on hot EF measures. We also expect that EF (and particularly hot EF) will be associated with adverse outcomes in FASD. Finally, we expect that the EF interventions will lead to improvements in EF. The research will inform our understanding of EF in FASD and thus has implications of the health and development of children and adolescents with FASD.