AROUSAL AND ATTENTION IN HIGH RISK NEONATES

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The proposed research continues a study the process of arousal and attention during development and its influence on later perceptual, cognitive, and autoregulatory systems, in both normal infants and infants at risk for poor outcome due to CNS injury. The specific aims are to determine: 1) the early neural substrates of arousal and attention; 2) the interaction of arousal and attention across development; and 3) the consequences of developmental transitions in arousal and attention for perceptual, cognitive, and autoregulatory development; and to 4) validate an assessment of early arousal-modulated attention (AMA) as a predictor of atypical development, with particular emphasis on autoregulatory outcomes. The design is a prospective, two tiered, longitudinal study of two cohorts: 336 newly recruited infants from the NICU followed from birth to 34 months, and 285 children previously studied as infants, and followed in this project from 34 to 60 months of age. Hypotheses will be tested using a battery of assessments at follow-up ages (4, 10, 16, 25, and 34 months for the new cohort and 34, 42, 51, and 60 months for the existing cohort). Emphasis is on neurophysiologic measures (visual and auditory evoked potentials) in the newborn period, behavioral measures of autoregulatory and AMA processes during the 1st year, and higher order executive control measures at later ages, in order to understand the antecedents and consequences of these processes at each period. Results will be analyzed using multivariate, multilevel statistical procedures including GEE and SEM, as appropriate.