Response inhibition is another area of weakness in alcohol-exposed children. On measures of inhibitory control, such as the Stroop Test, children with histories of heavy prenatal exposure to alcohol make more errors than typically developing children, particularly on the switching and interference conditions (Connor, Sampson, Bookstein, Barr, & Streissguth, 2000; Mattson, et al., 1999). A study using event-related potentials to examine response inhibition processing found that children with FAS and partial FAS behaviorally inhibited responses as well as control groups on a Go/No-Go task; however, the level of neural activation was greater in children prenatally exposed to alcohol, suggesting greater cognitive effort (Burden et al., 2009). Similar findings have been described in a study using fMRI during a Go/No-Go task (Fryer, Tapert, et al., 2007) (for further discussion, see Coles, et al., this issue). Poor inhibitory ability may be related to impaired theory of mind, as poor performance on theory of mind measures has been found to be correlated with a task of inhibition control in children with prenatal alcohol exposure (Rasmussen, Wyper, & Talwar, 2009).
