Psyc 210 Prenatal Development

Prenatal Development Essay

Megan Sponaugle

 PSYC 210-B09

I chose the article, “Cognitive Outcomes in prenatal methamphetamine exposed children aged six to seven years “by Kwiatkowski et. al. The purpose of this study was to examine the cognitive effects of children ages 6-7 whom had prenatal MA exposure and also resided in a resoursce-poor community (Kwiatkowski, M. A., Donald, K. A., Stein, D. J., Ipser, J., Thomas, K. G., & Roos, A. (2018)). They hypothesized that the effects of PME heighten when the children are also from a resource-poor environment (Kwiatkowski, M. A et. al, 2018). Through the study it was concluded that PME may have effects across several different functions including memory, visual-motor integration, and fine motor coordination. Their research also suggested that demographic factors also had somewhat substantial effects on cognitive development (Kwiatkowski, M. A et. al, 2018). Though previous research had led to the conclusion that neonates exposed to drugs affects their overall health, this study stands out by incorporating a socioeconomic factor. I learned that for a study to be reliable, it must have many trials and factors. This study had so many different methods and ways of gathering data. When working with these kinds of tests, it seems that they always do not necessarily getting all quantitative data that is set in stone, rather they must account for possible errors. Working with the brain seems almost impossible to get concrete data because every human is different and has had multiple outside factors affecting them and who would be able to say that does not have a change on the data? Some skills I have learned while reading this study is to critically think about what I may be missing. I would have never considered that a lower socioeconomic status would affect specifically PME children more than others. I also learned for my future work that it is okay to not be able to account for all outliers but be able to provide reliable explanations and try to account for them as much as I could. Lastly, reading this article will teach me to critically think about future articles and whether they took outliers into consideration.