Background Preterm birth may leave the brain vulnerable to dysfunction. Knowledge of future neurodevelopmental delay in children born with various degrees of prematurity is needed to inform practice and policy. Objective To quantify the long‐term cognitive, motor, behavioural and academic performance of children born with different degrees of prematurity compared with term‐born children. Search strategy PubMed and Embase were searched from January 1980 to December 2016 without language restrictions. Selection criteria Observational studies that reported neurodevelopmental outcomes from 2 years of age in children born preterm compared with a term‐born cohort. Data collection and analysis We pooled individual estimates of standardised mean differences (SMD) and odds ratios (OR) with 95% confidence intervals using a random effects model. Main results We included 74 studies (64 061 children). Preterm children had lower cognitive scores for FSIQ (SMD: −0.70; 95% CI: −0.73 to −0.66), PIQ (SMD: −0.67; 95% CI: −0.73 to −0.60) and VIQ (SMD: −0.53; 95% CI: −0.60 to −0.47). Lower scores for preterm children in motor skills, behaviour, reading, mathematics and spelling were observed at primary school age, and this persisted to secondary school age, except for mathematics. Gestational age at birth accounted for 38–48% of the observed IQ variance. ADHD was diagnosed twice as often in preterm children (OR: 1.6; 95% CI: 1.3–1.8), with a differential effect observed according to the severity of prematurity (I2 = 49.4%, P = 0.03). Conclusions Prematurity of any degree affects the cognitive performance of children born preterm. The poor neurodevelopment persists at various ages of follow up. Parents, educators, healthcare professionals and policy makers need to take into account the additional academic, emotional and behavioural needs of these children. Tweetable abstract Adverse effect of preterm birth on a child's neurodevelopment persists up to adulthood.

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This study is an attempt to analyse whether there may be separable components to the human ability to perceive people as people who engage in actions and who have attitudes. We adopted the approach of developmental psychopathology. Matched groups of typically developing, autistic and non-autistic retarded (MR) children and adolescents were tested for the ability to recognize videotaped representations of 'a person', a person's actions and a person's emotion-related attitudes and allied subjective states as manifest in moving point-light images of people. Autistic and non-autistic M R participants did not differ in the ability to recognize that a person was represented in very brief exposures of a walking point-light display; autistic, M R and typically developing participants were equally able to recognize a person's actions. Non-autistic M R and typically developing participants were also similar in their propensity to notice a person's attitudes vis-2-vis the person's actions, and in their abilities to recognize actions and attitudes when specifically asked to d o so. By comparison, however, autistic participants were specifically impaired in attending to and discriminating people's attitudes and states. The results are discussed in relation to current debates on the nature of basic person-perceptual abilities that may underpin typically developing children's understanding of persons with minds ('theory of mind'). Wc also consider their relevance for controversies over the primary deficits in autism.

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