Interhemispheric interaction during childhood: II. Children with early-treated phenylketonuria

This study examined whether children with early-treated phenylketonuria (ETPKU) exhibited a disruption in communication between the hemispheres as a function of computational complexity (Banich & Belger, 1990; Belger & Banich, 1992, 1998) when compared to neurologically uncompromised children who were matched in age and IQ. This investigation was motivated by findings that phenylketonuria affects myelination of neurons, including those that make up the corpus callosum, the main neural conduit for interhemispheric interaction. Children performed 2 tasks: a less complex physical-identity task and a more complex name-identity task. For both tasks, we compared performance on across-hemisphere trials, which require interhemispheric interaction, and on within-hemisphere trials, in which no hemispheric interaction is required. On the more complex name-identity task, children with ETPKU exhibited less of a benefit from across-hemisphere processing than did neurologically intact children. These results suggest that the interhemispheric interaction required to complete computationally complex tasks is compromised in children with ETPKU. Such an insufficiency may explain some of the attentional deficits observed in this group of children.