Christina DeFiori In the chapter Oh Rats!, C. Kwon Kim and his colleagues use rats in an experiment to try to learn about the effects that exposure of alcohol, prenatally, have on the cognition, or learning, of the newborn rats. This experiment tests a question that has been a major issue, especially in the human world. Women are encouraged to stay away from alcohol when pregnant because of the many issues that can come to their newborn child. This experiment uses rats to test this question in the sense of learning ability of the newborns.
The experiment brings together male and female rats until the females become pregnant, then the females are removed into individual cages. Of course the rats are all genetically similar and the cages are in a controlled lighting and temperature area. The pregnant females are then divided into three different groups. The first group, or Group E, receive a liquid diet of rat chow, which 36% of the calories are ethanol. The next group, or the Pair Fed group, also receive a liquid diet of rat chow, but instead of ethanol, it consist of a sugar like substance. Since this group is pair fed, the rats are paired with the rats from Group E and receive the same …show more content…
Even though this was not the case on day four, the trend is clear enough to draw a conclusion. When the rats are learning tasks that involve the position of some sort of object in a spatial region, the prenatal exposure to alcohol does negatively influence this ability. Even though this study does not prove anything, it does in fact support many other studies done in the same area, along with the initial hypothesis of the experiment. The findings from this study join a great number of other research that have shown the damages that prenatal alcohol consumption can have on