Understand how high-risk infants' development changes over time. Examine whether NICU Network Neurobehavioral Scale (NNNS) profiles are associated with decrements in developmental outcomes between ...ages 2 and 3 years in infants born very preterm.
The Neonatal Outcomes for Very preterm Infants (NOVI) cohort is a multisite prospective study of 704 preterm infants born <30 weeks' gestation across nine university and VON affiliated NICUs. Data included infant neurobehavior measured by NNNS profiles at NICU discharge and the Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development (BSID-III) at ages 2 and 3 years. Generalized estimating equations tested associations between NNNS profiles and BSID-III composite score changes between ages 2 and 3 years.
The final study sample included 433 infants with mean gestational age of 27 weeks at birth. Infants with dysregulated NNNS profiles were more likely to have decreases in BSID-III Cognitive (OR = 2.66) and Language scores (OR = 2.53) from age 2 to 3 years compared to infants with more well-regulated neurobehavioral NNNS profiles. Further, infants with more well-regulated NNNS profiles were more likely to have increases in BSID-III Cognitive scores (OR = 2.03), rather than no change, compared to infants with dysregulated NNNS profiles.
Prior to NICU discharge, NNNS neurobehavioral profiles identified infants at increased risk for developing later language and cognitive challenges. Findings suggests that neonatal neurobehavior provides a unique, clinically significant contribution to the evaluation of very preterm infants to inform treatment planning for the most vulnerable.
•Very preterm infants (VPI) are at a heightened risk for poor developmental outcomes.•VPI with dysregulated neurobehavioral profiles at NICU discharge were at highest risk.•These infants were more likely to have decrements in cognitive and language scores from 2 to 3 years.•Neurobehavior profiles can prospectively identify VPI at highest risk for poor outcomes.
Breastfeeding confers many benefits to the breast-fed infant which are reflected by better short-term and long-term outcomes as compared to formula-fed infants. Many components of breast milk are ...likely to contribute to these favorable outcomes, and there has recently been focus on the milk fat globule membrane (MFGM). This fraction is a heterogenous mixture of proteins (many of them glycosylated), phospholipids, sphingolipids, gangliosides, choline, sialic acid and cholesterol which is lacking in infant formula as milk fat (which is also low in these components) is replaced by vegetable oils. Many of these components have been shown to have biological effects, and there is considerable evidence from preclinical studies and clinical trials that providing bovine MFGM results in improved outcomes, in particular with regard to infections and neurodevelopment. Since bovine MFGM is commercially available, it is possible to add it to infant formula. There are, however, considerable variations in composition among commercial sources of bovine MFGM, and as it is not known which of the individual components provide the various bioactivities, it becomes important to critically review studies to date and to delineate the mechanisms behind the activities observed. In this review, we critically examine the preclinical and clinical studies on MFGM and its components in relation to resistance to infections, cognitive development, establishment of gut microbiota and infant metabolism, and discuss possible mechanisms of action.
Motor development is a dynamic and continuous process in which motor skills present a gain and progression. It is influenced by the experiences to which the infant is exposed, such as the home ...environment. The infants' residence has gained prominence, as it is the first environment experienced, and when rich in affordances, it establishes a positive connection with motor development. Motor skills such as head control, reaching, grasping, and manipulating objects provide greater functionality and exploration so that the infant can develop.
To verify the influence of the available affordances in the home environment in the performance domain of typical infants' motor development.
This is a longitudinal study with two infants (one boy) born at term, evaluated in their homes from three to 10 months of age. The affordances availability was measured by Affordances in the Home Environment for Motor Development - Baby Scale (AHEMD-IS) questionnaire. It covers dimensions of the home environment such as physical space, variety of stimulation, and gross motor and fine motor toys, classifying them as less than adequate, moderately adequate, adequate, and excellent. The evaluation of the dependent variable, motor performance, was performed using the Infant Motor Profile (IMP). The analyzes were carried out in a descriptive, exploratory, and blind manner by two evaluators. The items analyzed in the performance domains were head control and manual reach, in the supine (items 1 and 14), prone (items 22 and 27), sitting (items 34 and 40), and sitting on the guardians' lap (item 66) postures.
Regarding the home environment affordances, infants maintained excellent and adequate classification in the gross motor skills and variety of stimulation domains during all months. The home physical space remained excellent for 50% of the infants, and for the other 50%, it changed from less than adequate to adequate in the 8th month. At this month, the infant achieved better scores in the motor performance domain. As the scores in the AHEMD-IS domains improved, the infants improved their motor skills. It was observed that adequate availability of fine motor toys at four months old allowed a score of 5 (item 66) in the IMP. While at five months old with excellent availability, a score of 6 (item 66) was obtained in the posture sitting on the caregiver's lap and supine position.
The present study presented the influence of the home environment affordances on motor performance at IMP. As the physical space of the residence and fine motor toy dimensions scores increased, there was an increase in the reaching, grasping, and manipulating objects scores and, consequently, in the total score of the performance domain.
The knowledge about how the influence of home environment affordances on the motor performance and motor skills of infants can be essential to guide clinical practice. In addition, this knowledge will allow health professionals to coach parents on how to stimulate motor development at home in a more assertive and individualized way.
Infants’ preference for vowel harmony (VH, a phonotactic constraint that requires vowels in a word to be featurally similar) is thought to be language-specific: Monolingual infants learning VH ...languages show a listening preference for VH patterns by 6 months of age, while those learning non-VH languages do not (Gonzalez-Gomez et al., 2019; Van Kampen et al., 2008). We investigated sensitivity to advanced tongue root (ATR) harmony in Akan (Kwa, Niger-Congo) in 40 six-month-old multilingual infants (21 girls) in Ghana, West Africa (an understudied population), all learning Akan, Ghanaian English, and most of them several other understudied African languages (e.g., Ga, Ewe). We hypothesized that infants learning both ATR harmony and nonharmony languages would demonstrate sensitivity to ATR harmony. Using the central fixation procedure, infants were presented with disyllabic nonwords that were either harmonic (e.g., puti) or nonharmonic (e.g., petɔ) based on their ATR features. Infants demonstrated sensitivity to ATR harmony with a familiarity preference, listening longer to harmonic syllable sequences than nonharmonic ones. The relative amount of exposure to (an) ATR harmony language(s) did not modulate the preference. These results shed light on our understanding of early multilingualism: they suggest that early sensitivity to VH in multilinguals may be similar to monolingual infants learning other types of VH, irrespective of simultaneous experience with non-VH languages. We conclude with reflections on studying infant language acquisition in multilingual Africa. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: journal abstract)
Sometime before their second birthday, many children have a period of rapid expressive vocabulary growth called the vocabulary spurt. Theories of the underlying mechanisms differ: Accumulator models ...emphasize the accumulation of experience with words over time to yield a spurtlike pattern, while cognitive models attribute the spurt to cognitive changes. To test these theories, English–French monolingual and bilingual children with different exposure to each language were studied. Dense, longitudinal data were analyzed from 45 infants aged 16–30 months, whose expressive vocabulary was measured on a total of 617 occasions in English and/or French. Single-language (English and/or French), concept (number of concepts lexicalized across both languages), and word (sum of both languages) vocabulary scores were computed. Infants’ exposure to each language and their exposure balance were measured using a language exposure questionnaire. Logistic curves were fitted to each infant’s data to estimate the timing (midpoint) and steepness (slope) of the vocabulary spurt in single-language, concept, and word vocabularies. Seventy-six percent of infants showed a spurt in at least one vocabulary type, and bilinguals were less likely to show one in their nondominant than their dominant language. For single-language vocabulary, infants with more exposure to a language had earlier spurts. For combined vocabularies (concept and word), monolinguals and unbalanced bilinguals had earlier and steeper spurts than balanced bilinguals. Results better support the predictions of accumulator models than cognitive theories and show that infants follow different vocabulary acquisition trajectories based on their language background. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: journal abstract)
•A set of meta-analyses on the associations between IDS prosody and infant outcomes.•Prototypical IDS prosody is associated with better attentional and communicative outcomes.•Several moderators ...influenced the IDS-outcomes association.•IDS F0 contours were more associated with infant outcomes than F0 variability.•The multidimensional role of IDS for infant development is discussed.
Infant-directed speech (IDS) is the particular voice register observed in the majority of parents in interaction with their infants and differs from natural speech used in conversations with adults by showing exaggerated prosodic features. These prosodic features are supposed to have effects on regulating infant arousal and attention, fostering infant pre-linguistic and linguistic competences and enhancing the expression of positive affect. The present set of meta-analyses was conducted to test these associations and the role of moderators during the first two years of infant life. The results confirmed an overall association between IDS prosody and infant outcomes with prosodic values typical of IDS associated with better outcomes. This association was confirmed for attentional, pre-linguistic and linguistic outcomes with a greater effect on pre-linguistic than linguistic outcomes. An insufficient number of studies was found to test the association with infant emotion expression.
Many limitations in the existing body of literature were found, such as a lack of empirical papers exploring IDS prosody in relation to infant outcomes using natural observations. The results and limitations were discussed in light of the necessity to examine the interplay between the quality of IDS prosody and other aspects of parental communicative and caregiving competences. To do so, the contribution of scholars from different fields is needed with the aim to fully understand the multidimensional determinants and influential mechanisms of IDS.
The study of infant gaze has long been a key tool for understanding the developing mind. However, labor-intensive data collection and processing limit the speed at which this understanding can be ...advanced. Here, we demonstrate an asynchronous workflow for conducting violation-of-expectation (VoE) experiments, which is fully “hands-off” for the experimenter. We first replicate four classic VoE experiments in a synchronous online setting, and show that VoE can generate highly replicable effects through remote testing. We then confirm the accuracy of a state-of-the-art gaze annotation software, iCatcher+ in a new setting. Third, we train parents to control the experiment flow based on the infant’s gaze. Combining all three innovations, we then conduct an asynchronous automated infant-contingent VoE experiment. The hands-off workflow successfully replicates a classic VoE effect: infants look longer at inefficient actions than efficient ones. We compare the resulting effect size and statistical power to the same study run in-lab and synchronously via Zoom. The hands-off workflow significantly reduces the marginal cost and time per participant, enabling larger sample sizes. By enhancing the reproducibility and robustness of findings relying on infant looking, this workflow could help support a cumulative science of infant cognition. Tools to implement the workflow are openly available. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: journal abstract)
Brain enlargement has been observed in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but the timing of this phenomenon, and the relationship between ASD and the appearance of behavioural symptoms, ...are unknown. Retrospective head circumference and longitudinal brain volume studies of two-year olds followed up at four years of age have provided evidence that increased brain volume may emerge early in development. Studies of infants at high familial risk of autism can provide insight into the early development of autism and have shown that characteristic social deficits in ASD emerge during the latter part of the first and in the second year of life. These observations suggest that prospective brain-imaging studies of infants at high familial risk of ASD might identify early postnatal changes in brain volume that occur before an ASD diagnosis. In this prospective neuroimaging study of 106 infants at high familial risk of ASD and 42 low-risk infants, we show that hyperexpansion of the cortical surface area between 6 and 12 months of age precedes brain volume overgrowth observed between 12 and 24 months in 15 high-risk infants who were diagnosed with autism at 24 months. Brain volume overgrowth was linked to the emergence and severity of autistic social deficits. A deep-learning algorithm that primarily uses surface area information from magnetic resonance imaging of the brain of 6-12-month-old individuals predicted the diagnosis of autism in individual high-risk children at 24 months (with a positive predictive value of 81% and a sensitivity of 88%). These findings demonstrate that early brain changes occur during the period in which autistic behaviours are first emerging.
Evidence on newborns' discrimination of emotional facial expressions is scarce, and the question of what is the nature of the visual information that newborns rely on to perform such discrimination ...remains open. Here, we manipulated the spatial frequency (SF) content of the stimuli by selectively removing low spatial frequency (LSF) and high spatial frequency bands using newborn-appropriate cutoffs to investigate what information newborns use when preferring and discriminating between dynamic displays showing happy and fearful expressions unfolding over time. Using a preferential looking paradigm, in Study 1 (
= 63, 59% females, 92% White), we showed that newborns looked longer to happy over fearful expressions in unfiltered (broad spatial frequency) and high-pass (high spatial frequency > 0.6 cycles per degree cpd) faces but not in low-pass (LSF < 0.5 cpd) faces. In Study 2 (
= 22, 59% females, 91% White), newborns tested in a visual habituation paradigm showed successful discrimination of the two LSF emotions. Results show that newborns can discriminate between dynamic images of happy and fearful facial expressions containing either extreme low SF (< 0.5 cpd) information or higher SF (> 0.6 cpd) bandwidth. Their preference for the happy expression was present for intact and high-pass filtered faces but not for low-pass faces. This SF effect is tentatively driven by an enhancement of attentional response to the LSF fearful face, whereas the response to the happy face is unaffected by the SF manipulation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).
Fear reactivity is an early emerging temperament trait that predicts longer term behavioral and health outcomes. The current analysis tests the hypothesis, an extension of prior research on maternal ...immune activation (MIA), that the prenatal maternal immune system is a reliable predictor of observed fear reactivity in infancy. The analysis is based on a prospective longitudinal cohort study that collected data from the first trimester and conducted observational assessments of temperament at approximately 12 months of age (
= 281 infants). MIA was assessed from immune biomarkers measured in maternal blood at each trimester; infant temperament was assessed using the Laboratory Temperament Assessment Battery assessment at 12 months; covariates included family and sociodemographic factors. Patterns of inflammatory markers across gestation reliably predicted observed temperament: elevated prenatal MIA was associated with high fear reactivity to novel stimuli. The findings provide novel evidence of prenatal origins of fear reactivity and suggest developmental mechanisms that may underlie early emerging individual differences in child temperament. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).
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