Cognitive flexibility in 12-month-old preterm and term infants is associated with neurobehavioural development in 18-month-olds

Abstract

There is growing evidence that preterm children are at an increased risk of poor executive functioning, which underlies behavioural and attention problems. Previous studies have suggested that early cognitive flexibility is a possible predictor of later executive function; however, how it develops in infancy and relates to the later neurobehavioural outcomes is still unclear in the preterm population. Here, we conducted a longitudinal study to investigate oculomotor response shifting in 27 preterm and 25 term infants at 12 months and its relationship with general cognitive development and effortful control, which is a temperamental aspect closely associated with executive function, at 18 months. We found that moderate to late preterm and term infants significantly inhibited previously rewarded look responses, while very preterm infants did not show significant inhibition of perseverative looking at 12 months. Moreover, lower inhibition of perseverative looking was significantly associated with lower general cognitive development and attentional shifting at 18 months. These findings suggest that the early atypical patterns of oculomotor response shifting may be a behavioural marker for predicting a higher risk of negative neurobehavioural outcomes, including attention-related problems in preterm children.

Predicting 2-year neurodevelopmental outcomes in preterm infants using multimodal structural brain magnetic resonance imaging with local connectivity

“…The emergence of cognitive function is largely influenced by the development of specific subnetworks rather than the development of the whole brain 56 . Differential brain regions identified in this study that predicted cognitive outcomes included the left cuneus, lingual, superior occipital gyrus, and putamen, which are consistent with the regions identified in previous studies 57 , 58 . They may be responsible for a series of cognitive processes in early brain development, such as the primary processing of visual, and somatosensory information for cognitive 59 , 60 and sensory association for higher-order cognitive developments 61 .…”

Impact of Differing Language Background Exposures on Bayley-III Language Assessment in a National Cohort of Children Born Less than 29 Weeks’ Gestation

“…Furthermore, white matter dysmaturation and altered functional connectivity in the preterm versus the term brain likely contribute to this potential differential impact of language environments on preterm compared to term-born infants [ 40 ]. As early as age 12 months, executive functions [ 41 ] such as cognitive flexibility and shifting are altered in preterm infants, which is another potential contributing factor to challenges of acquiring a second language.…”

Data from “Object Labeling Activates Young Children’s Scale Errors at an Early Stage of Verb Vocabulary Growth”

“…The other primary independent variables were the conditions (noun or pronoun conditions as a within-participant variable) and interactions between developmental indices and conditions. As covariates, we included the study order (i.e., first or second time) and the effortful control score in the Japanese version of the Early Childhood Behavior Questionnaire (ECBQ; Putnam, Gartstein, & Rothbart, 2006;Sukigara, Nakagawa, & Mizuno, 2015), which was related to participant's executive function (Shinya et al, 2022), taken in the second session. Effortful control in the ECBQ is a temperament factor related to participants' executive function (Shinya et al, 2022) and is operationally defined by primary loadings for inhibitory control, attention shifting, low-intensity pleasure, cuddliness, and attention focusing (Putnam et al, 2006).…”

“…As developmental indices, we used the participants' age in months during the first session and the productive vocabulary sizes of nouns, verbs, and adjectives, which was calculated by summing the checked items from the J-MCDI. We also included the effortful control score from the ECBQ as a covariate to take individual differences in inhibitory control into account as in Shinya et al (2022). This score was calculated by averaging the five sub-factors: inhibitory control, attention shifting, low-intensity pleasure, cuddliness, and attention focusing (Putnam et al, 2006).…”