Motion perception in Russian children with fetal alcohol syndrome

60% of fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) children have visual impairments. Investigations of visual functions by traditional methods do not appear to fully outline the problems these children may have. We therefore evaluated motion perception in FAS children. We investigated forty-nine children aged 10 ^ 16 years with verified FAS and fifty-two matched controls. We used computer- based motion detection test based on random-dot kinematograms consisting of 150 or fewer moving (in one of eight directions) white dots on a black screen. The stimuli were presented in two different sequences: sequentially (experiment 1) with increasing difficulty, and random (exper- iment 2). FAS children showed significantly lower performance at all noise levels in both tests, but the experiment showed significant differences between the two groups only in experiment 1. There was no difference in motion perception in random conditions, suggesting that random sequence is less efficient in discriminating the two groups. Results indicate that the magnocellular pathway, here appropriate for its testing, is impaired in FAS children. Strong differences found in our experiment with black-and-white normal sequence suggest that motion-perception stimulus is an efficient test to investigate perceptual performance and to discriminate the two groups. This may have implications for other visual functions such as reading.