Attention control in preterm and term 5-month-old infants: Cross-task stability increases with gestational age

Perra, Oliver, Winstanley, Alice, Sperotto, Rebecca and Gattis, Merideth ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8665-7577 2024. Attention control in preterm and term 5-month-old infants: Cross-task stability increases with gestational age. Infancy 29 (3) , pp. 437-458. 10.1111/infa.12574

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Abstract

Cross-task stability refers to performance consistency across different settings and measures of the same construct. Cross-task stability can help us understand developmental processes, including how risks such as preterm birth affect outcomes. We investigated cross-task stability of attention control in 32 preterm and 39 term infants. All infants had the same chronological age at time of testing (5 months) but varied in gestational age at birth (30 to 42 weeks). Infants completed an experimental attention following task with a researcher and a naturalistic play observation with their mothers. Both preterm and term infants demonstrated attention following in the experimental task. Gestational age and flexibility of attention were related: the likelihood of no turn trials decreased with increasing gestational age. To evaluate cross-task stability, we compared attention performance in the experimental and naturalistic settings. Flexible attention shifts on the experimental task were positively related to attention to objects in the naturalistic observation. Furthermore, the association between flexible attention shifts on the experimental task and attention to objects in the naturalistic observation was moderated by gestational age. Our study provides initial evidence that the consolidation of attention control increases with gestational age. These findings highlight the value of comparing experimental and observational measures of attention.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Psychology
Publisher:	Wiley
ISSN:	1525-0008
Funders:	Wellcome Trust
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	8 December 2023
Date of Acceptance:	30 November 2023
Last Modified:	07 May 2024 13:37
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/164622

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