Background: Preterm birth is closely associated with neurocognitive impairment in childhood including increased risk for social difficulties. Eye tracking objectively assesses eye-gaze behaviour in response to visual stimuli, which permits inference about underlying cognitive processes. We tested the hypothesis that social orienting in infancy is altered by preterm birth. Methods: Fifty preterm infants with mean (range) gestational age (GA) at birth of 29 +1 (23 +2 -33 +0 ) weeks and 50 term infants with mean (range) GA at birth 40 +2 (37 +0 -42 +3 ) weeks underwent eye tracking at median age of 7 months. Infants were presented with three categories of social stimuli of increasing complexity. Time to first fixate (TFF) and looking time (LT) on areas of interest (AoIs) were recorded using remote eye tracking. Results: Preterm infants consistently fixated for a shorter time on social content than term infants across all three tasks: face-scanning (fixation to eyes minus mouth 0.61s vs. 1.47s, p = .013); face pop-out task (fixation to face 0.8s vs. 1.34s, p = .023); and social preferential looking (1.16s vs. 1.5s p = .02). Time given to AoIs containing social content as a proportion of LT at the whole stimulus was lower in preterm infants across all three tasks. These results were not explained by differences in overall looking time between the groups. Conclusions: Eye tracking provides early evidence of atypical cognition after preterm birth, and may be a useful tool for stratifying infants at risk of impairment for early interventions designed to improve outcome.
It is well established that adults converge on common referring expressions in dialogue, and that such lexical alignment is important for successful and rewarding communication. The authors show that children with an autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) and chronological- and verbal-age-matched typically developing (TD) children also show spontaneous lexical alignment. In a card game, both groups tended to refer to an object using the same name as their partner had previously used for the same or a different token of the object. This tendency to align on a pragmatically conditioned aspect of language did not differ between ASD and TD groups, and was unaffected by verbal/chronological age, or (in the ASD group) Theory of Mind or social functioning. The authors suggest that lexical priming can lead to automatic lexical alignment in both ASD and TD children's dialogue. Their results further suggest that ASD children's conversational impairments do not involve an all-encompassing deficit in linguistic imitation. (PsycINFO Database Record
Citation: Turk, D. J., Brady-van den Bos, M., Collard, P., Gillespie-Smith, K., Conway, M.A. & Cunningham, S.J. (2013). Divided attention selectively impairs memory for self-relevant information. Memory and Cognition, 41(4), pp. 503-510. doi: 10.3758/s13421-012-0279-0 This is the accepted version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Permanent AbstractInformation that is relevant to self tends to be remembered more than information relating to other people, but the role of attention in eliciting this 'selfreference effect' is unclear. The present study assessed the importance of attention using an ownership paradigm, which requires participants to encode items under conditions of imagined ownership by themselves or another participant. Previous work has established that this paradigm elicits a robust self-reference effect, with more 'self-owned' items being remembered than 'other-owned' items. Attentional resource availability was manipulated using divided attention tasks at encoding (Expt.1) and during a subsequent Remember-Know recognition test (Expt. 2). A significant self-reference effect in Remember responses emerged under full attention conditions, but dividing attention at either encoding or test eliminated the memory advantage for self-owned items. These findings are discussed in relation to the nature of self-referential cognition and the importance of attentional resource input at both encoding and retrieval in the creation and manifestation of the self-reference effect in memory.
The preference of infants to fixate on social information in a stimulus is well known. We examine how this preference manifests across a series of free‐viewing tasks using different stimulus types. Participants were thirty typically developing infants. We measured eye movements when viewing isolated faces, faces alongside objects in a grid, and faces naturally presented in photographed scenes. In each task, infants fixated social content for longer than nonsocial content. Social preference scores representing distribution of fixation to social versus general image content were highly correlated and thus combined into a single composite measure, which was independent of demographic and behavioral measures. We infer that multiple eye‐tracking tasks can be used to generate a composite measure of social preference in infancy. This approach may prove useful in the early characterization of developmental disabilities.
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