A strength of this study can be seen in physical setup of the laboratory for the study. The researchers watched the rats on a video monitor, rather than directly. This was done to eliminate the possibility that the position or behavior of the researcher could influence the platform searching behavior of the rat. If this had not been done, it is possible that researchers might have given subtle indications about the location of the platform without even being aware of doing so. A weakness of this study was that the participants were rats.
Ethics prohibit the study of maternal ethanol exposure in humans using a true experiment.
In order to do so it would be necessary to randomly assign women to alcohol exposure during pregnancy. Clearly the primary purpose of the study was to draw a conclusion about humans but the evidence collected in the study only makes an indirect argument about what happens when human mothers consume alcohol during pregnancy. In an experiment, pregnant rats were randomly assigned to alcohol exposure or not. Their pups were tested for learning deficits and it was found that they took significantly longer to find a hidden platform in a water maze, suggesting that prenatal alcohol exposure can lead to learning deficits.