Gaze Following Is Accelerated in Healthy Preterm Infants

Abstract

Gaze following is an essential human communication cue that orients the attention of two interacting people to the same external object. This capability is robustly observed after 7 months of age in full-term infants. Do healthy preterm infants benefit from their early exposure to face-to-face interactions with other humans to acquire this capacity sooner than full-term infants of the same chronological age, despite their immature brains? In two different experiments, we demonstrated that 7-month-old preterm infants performed like 7-month-old full-term infants (with whom they shared the same chronological age) and not like 4-month-old full-term infants (with whom they shared the same postmenstrual age). The duration of exposure to visual experience thus appears to have a greater impact on the development of early gaze following than does postmenstrual age.

Preference for Dynamic Human Images and Gaze‐Following Abilities in Preterm Infants at 6 and 12 Months of Age: An Eye‐Tracking Study

“…Therefore, the discrepancy between our results and Peña et al. () in gaze following of preterm infants might be explained by gestational age difference.…”

The Infancy of the Human Brain

“…In a series of experiments, Peñ a and colleagues showed that the loss of sensitivity to suprasegmental and segmental features of a foreign language that normally occurs during the first year of life was not dependent on the duration of exposure to broadcast speech (Peñ a et al, 2010(Peñ a et al, , 2012. In contrast, sensitivity to the phonotactic rules of the native language varies with the duration of postnatal experience (Gonzalez-Gomez and Nazzi, 2012), as do a number of visual functions including binocular perception (Jandó et al, 2012) and gaze following (Peñ a et al, 2014). These variations should not be viewed as inconsistent but as pertinent dissociations shedding light on how these computations are realized in vivo.…”

Acquisition du langage chez l’enfant prématuré durant la première année de vie

“…On notera aussi que l'acquisition du langage dépend également du traitement d'autres modalités perceptives, notamment de certains aspects du traitement visuel, comme la capacité à fixer les lèvres ou les yeux de la personne qui parle, et l'attention jointe (entre un enfant, l'adulte qui lui parle et l'objet qui est par exemple désigné par l'adulte). Ainsi, les similitudes et les différences observées dans le dévelop-pement du traitement visuel entre enfants nés à terme et enfants prématurés [39,40] devraient aussi contribuer à moduler les trajectoires d'acquisition langagière dans ces deux populations.…”