Effects of occupational exposure to organic solvents upon cognitive performance

Twenty-three individuals exposed to mixed organic solvents were compared with 23 nonexposed controls on a number of cognitive performance tasks. Solvent exposure resulted in a significantly poorer performance on the forward digit span test, copying of a complex figure, and on semantic memory tests which also measure individual's ability to integrate linguistic information into cohesive units. These tasks rely heavily upon short-term memory and its integrative operations in higher cognitive function. Acute exposure effect was also observed for the linguistic integrative task.