ABSTRACT
The children born to women who used cocaine during pregnancy represent a segment of the population that has sustained a unique biologic exposure. This epidemic has captured considerable research interest, including a focus on understanding the behavioral deficits evident in offspring exposed transplacentally to cocaine. This chapter identifies the role that prenatal cocaine exposure plays in affecting rodent performance during conditioning and discrimination paradigms that often invoke (or require) attentional processes. It addresses the effect of cocaine-induced malnutrition in modulating deficits. The relationship between malnutrition and inattention is a problem that has been documented clinically and in experimental primate and rodent research. Transplacental cocaine exposure impairs neonatal and adult behaviors. In adult animals, this includes a consistent deficit across paradigms in impaired performance in conditioning and discrimination tasks.
