MEMORY DEVELOPMENT IN HIGH- AND LOW-RISK INFANTS

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This subproject is one of many research subprojects utilizing the resources provided by a Center grant funded by NIH/NCRR. The subproject and investigator (PI) may have received primary funding from another NIH source, and thus could be represented in other CRISP entries. The institution listed is for the Center, which is not necessarily the institution for the investigator. Although on global measures of intellectual development many children with preterm histories fall in the normative range (Caputi, Goldstein, & Taub, 1979; Crowe, Deitz, Bennet, & TeKolste, 1988), with more selective testing, they show subtle deficits in, for example, memory (de Haan, Bauer, Georgieff, & Nelson, 2000) and speed of processing (Rose & Feldman, 1996). Studies of these more specific processes in preterms are few, but suggestive. The present research, utilizing the same methods found in the literature, will test both global and specific processes in both low- and high-risk preterms. Two control groups will be used: chronological-age-matched, healthy fullterm infants, and corrected-age-matched, healthy fullterm infants. These control groups are included to explore which, if any, processes measured improve with experience, as the preterms will have much more experience in the environment relative to the corrected-age-matched, healthy fullterms. This research seeks to establish the presence of memory deficits in preterms above-and-beyond global measures of cognition and establish concomitants of these specific memory deficits by exploring differential patterns of attention and latencies to activate the processing systems. It is important to determine in preterms whether the observed memory deficits are related to an inability to quickly activate attentional systems and/or to differential patterns of attention duration. The proposed research will examine both duration of examining and latency to examining as well as relations between these processes and memory performance as measured by elicited imitation. Research with this population is important because (a) infants at high-risk and infants who appear to be low-risk and normally developing may later show developmental difficulties in preschool and school age, (b) identification of early specific deficits and their correlates will facilitate early remediation of pathways leading to later detrimental outcomes and (c) this work can be used as an "experimental" model for investigating the relative importance of maturational and experiential factors in development of cognitive abilities (e.g., Jiang, 1995; Matthews et al., 1996; van Hof-van Duin, Heersema, Groenendalls, Baerts, & Fetter, 1992). The GCRC will be integral to this proposal in scheduling of participants, supplying space in the infancy core, and providing a technician for administration of tasks (i.e. Bayley Scales of Infant Development).