No abstract

The effects of neighborhood and family income and family risk factors on developmental test scores at ages 1 through 3 are examined using a subsample (N = 347) from the Infant Health and Development Program. Beneficial effects of low numbers of risks were found for scores at ages 1 through 3. Family poverty was associated with lower scores at ages 2 and 3. Neighborhood affluence was associated with higher scores at age 3. The family risks-test score association at ages 1 through 3 and family income-test score association at ages 2 and 3 were mediated by home environment. Mediated effects were stronger for family income-test score associations at age 3 than for neighborhood income. Moderating effects of family risk on family and neighborhood income effects revealed an interaction between family poverty and risks for scores at age 3. Explanations for the early links between family risks and test scores and the later links between income and test scores are discussed.

7-month-old full-terms and high-risk preterms (less than 1,500 grams at birth) were compared on problems of visual recognition memory and tactual-to-visual cross-modal transfer. On the visual problems, preterm infants showed significantly less differential attentiveness to novelty than full-terms. They also required longer exposure times during visual familiarization, primarily because of longer pauses between fixations. Preterms and full-terms exhibited different patterns of looking, as indicated by the duration of fixation and the frequency in shifts of gaze. On the cross-modal problems, preterms and full-terms both exhibited similar and significant preferences for familiar rather than novel stimuli, a direction of preference which suggests that these problems were relatively difficult for both groups. For the preterms, novelty and exposure-time scores were found to be related to several medical risk factors. Novelty preferences were compromised in preterms who had suffered RDS postnatally, particularly those who had required prolonged mechanical ventilation. In general, high-risk preterms exhibited deficits in visual recognition memory and in the ability to recruit, sustain, and shift attention.

Because manipulative exploration of objects may be important to the infant's perception and conceptualization of objects, this study compared full-term infants with preterm infants who are considered to be at risk for cognitive deficits. 30 preterms at 9 months, with age corrected for prematurity, and 20 9-month-old full-terms were videotaped while they explored novel objects; the videotapes were scored for behaviors such as looking, handling, mouthing, turning the object around, fingering, transferring from hand to hand, and banging. There were no differences between the preterms and the full-terms. A "low-risk" subgroup and a "high-risk" subgroup of preterms were then compared with each other as well as to the full-terms. The low-risk subgroup was essentially the same as the full-terms. The high-risk preterms, however, fingered, rotated, and transferred the objects less than either the full-terms or the low-risk preterms. There was a relationship between manipulative exploration at 9 months and later cognitive functioning, suggesting that lower levels of manipulation may be one way in which cognitive deficits originate or are maintained.

As part of a longitudinal study of high-risk preterm infants (birthweight less than 1500 g) and a low socioeconomic status (SES) comparison group of full-term infants, measures of information processing were obtained at 1 year: visual and tactual recognition memory, cross-modal transfer, and object permanence. Of these, cross-modal transfer was the most strongly related to later intelligence, correlating with outcome at 1.5, 2, 3, 4, and 5 years for preterms and from 3-5 years for full-terms (rs = .44 to .54); relations with outcome were independent of SES, maternal education, medical risk, and early Bayley scores. When this 1-year measure of cross-modal transfer was combined with 7-month visual recognition memory, 35%-51% of the variance in 3-, 4-, and 5-year IQ was explained.Studies of infant development have existed for well over 100 years, but it is only recently that efforts have been made to characterize cognitive development during this period from an information-processing perspective. Earlier work was directed primarily toward delineating the different accomplishments or achievements that distinguish one developmental level from another. By contrast, much of the more recent work is designed to discover the nature of the processes that underlie cognitive development. These efforts are bearing fruit. New techniques have been developed, and there is now a burgeoning literature indicating not only that early cognitive competence can be measured, but also that rapid cognitive development is a hallmark of early infancy. During the first year of life, infants evidence the capacity for complex visual discriminations, rapid learning, long-term memory, categorization, cross-modal transfer, and various types of subtle abstractions (for reviews, see Olson & Sherman, 1983;Rose & Ruff, 1987;Rovee-Collier & Gekoski, 1979).Recently, we and other investigators have found that individual differences on some of these early abilities are related to later intelligence. For example, there is a growing body of evidence that infants who show better visual recognition memory or faster visual habituation achieve higher scores on measures