Arousal and Attention Regulation in High Risk Children

描述（由申请人提供）：本项目建立在从以前的资助资助中获得的知识基础上，通过扩展我们关于早期唤醒和注意力重要性的假设。它包括增加新的研究领域和风险人群的子项目，并纵向扩展到学龄儿童。研究对象包括婴儿和儿童，从新生儿期到婴儿期，从学龄前到学龄早期。该设计是一项前瞻性纵向研究，包括三个队列：(1)新招募的婴儿（n = 330），从出生到34个月；两组先前招募的婴儿（2,275名）从34-60个月随访，（3,150名）从60 - 96个月随访。唤起和注意的充分发展似乎是正常自我调节发展的必要条件，而自我调节的缺陷将产生深远的影响，产生运动、沟通和语言、执行功能和认知组织的问题。根据我们之前的研究，婴儿早期觉醒和注意力之间的关系会被急性中枢神经系统损伤和神经毒性等风险条件以系统和不同的方式破坏。类似的破坏可能是由于子宫内的慢性压力和遗传因素。这些破坏发生的方式和时间，以及可塑性如何影响恢复，对发育的影响远远超出婴儿期，这取决于影响的性质、时间和持续时间。研究觉醒、注意力和自我调节，以及这些过程如何受到不同的产前和产后风险条件的影响，是理解一系列生物行为过程及其发展的基础，对多个学科具有重要的理论和实践意义。我们提出一个纲领性研究项目，由三个子项目和一个核心单元组成。子项目研究与以下相关的觉醒和注意调节的发展：1 .运动活动的调节；社会关注与沟通；执行功能。这项研究得到了测试核心的支持。项目活动被整合到一个连贯和互动的框架中。通过检查各个子项目之间的相互关系，我们的主要目标是对正常发育儿童和那些有不良结果风险的儿童的觉醒和注意力过程发展的机制产生更丰富、更准确的理解。这将有助于我们实现我们的长期实际目标，阐明高危婴儿和儿童的自我调节问题的行为后遗症。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This Program Project builds on knowledge gained from previous funded grants by expanding our hypotheses about the importance of early arousal and attention. It includes Subprojects that add new areas of study and risk populations, as well as extends longitudinally to school-age children. Studies include infants and children from the neonatal period through infancy, and pre-school years, up to early school-age. The design is a prospective longitudinal study of three cohorts: (1) newly recruited infants (n = 330) followed from birth to 34 months; and 2 cohorts of previously recruited infants (2) 275 followed from 34-60 months and (3) 150 children from 60 to 96 months. Adequate development of arousal and attention appears to be a necessary condition underlying normal autoregulatory development, and deficits in autoregulation will have far-reaching effects, producing problems in motor, communication and language, executive function, and cognitive organization. Based on our previous work, the relation between arousal and attention in early infancy is disrupted in systematic and differential ways by risk conditions such as acute CNS injury and neurotoxicity. Similar disruption might be expected by chronic stress in utero and genetic factors. How and when these disruptions take place, and how plasticity affects recovery, have implications for development well beyond the early infancy period, depending on the nature, timing and duration of the influence. Studying arousal, attention, and autoregulation, and how these processes are affected by different pre- and postnatal risk conditions, is fundamental to understanding a broad array of biobehavioral processes and their development, and is of major theoretical and practical importance to multiple disciplines. We propose a Project of programmatic research that is comprised of three Subprojects and one Core unit. The Subprojects study development of arousal and attention regulation related to I. Modulation of motor activity, II. Social attention and communication, and III. Executive function. The research is supported by a Testing Core. Program activities are integrated into a coherent and interactive framework. By examining the findings of individual Subprojects in relation to each other, our major goal is to generate a far richer and more accurate understanding of the mechanisms underlying the development of arousal and attention processes in both typically developing children and in those at risk for poor outcome. This will help us reach our long-term practical goal to elucidate behavioral sequelae of autoregulatory problems in high-risk infants and children.