Feasibility of undertaking off-site infant eye-tracking assessments of neuro-cognitive functioning in early-intervention centres

Recent work suggests that differences in functional brain development are already identifiable in 6- to 9-month-old infants from low socio-economic status (SES) backgrounds. Investigation of early SES-related differences in neuro-cognitive functioning requires the recruitment of large and diverse samples of infants, yet it is often difficult to persuade low-SES parents to come to a university setting. One solution is to recruit infants through early intervention children’s centres (CCs). These are often located in areas of high relative deprivation to support young children. Given the increasing portability of eye-tracking equipment, assessment of large clusters of infants could be undertaken in centres by suitably trained early intervention staff. Here we report on a study involving 174 infants and their parents, carried out in partnership with CCs, exploring the feasibility of this approach, We report the processes of setting up the project and participant recruitment. We report the diversity of sample obtained on the engagement of CC staff in training and the process of assessment itself. We report the quality of the data obtained, and the levels of engagement of parents, and infants. We conclude that this approach has great potential for recruiting large and diverse samples worldwide, provides sufficiently reliable data, and is engaging to staff, parents and infants

The Effect of Bilingualism on Executive Functioning Found in Young Adults: an eye-tracking study

The effect of bilingualism on executive functioning (EF) has long been a topic of discussion across the psycholinguistic field. It was previously assumed that acquiring two languages simultaneously may have an effect on the child’s cognitive development. This claim was later rejected and opposed by researchers who found that being fluent in two languages provides more cognitive benefits, than being fluent just in one language. Furthermore, neural processing in a bilingual brain influences several cognitive domains that were introduced by Miyake and Friedman’s framework, which explains the high inter-connectivity between specific executive functioning domains, such as inhibiting, monitoring, and updating. Aims and Methods: The current paper focused on establishing whether being bilingual aids executive functioning in a young adult population. Both monolingual (N = 16) and bilingual (N = 14) participants were tested on a number of cognitive tests. An eye-tracker was used to test inhibitory control, using pro- and anti-saccade conditions. Further, a multitasking and visuospatial working memory capacity task were completed using the press-pad. It was hypothesized that bilinguals will make less errors and initiate a faster response in comparison with monolinguals. However, no significant bilingual cognitive advantage was found in the three EFs components. However, bilinguals did initiate a saccade response faster in the inhibitory control task, while maintaining the same level of accuracy as the monolingual group. Future research should focus on improving the current paper design flaws as well as to include questionnaires for SES and IQ

Separating the effects of ethnicity and socio-economic status on sleep practices of 6- to 7-month-old infants

Infant sleep undergoes significant re-organization throughout the first 12 months of life, with sleep quality having significant consequences for infant learning and cognitive development. While there has been great interest in the neural basis and developmental trajectories of infant sleep in general, relatively little is known about individual differences in infant sleep and the socio-economic and cultural sources of that variability. We investigated this using questionnaire sleep data in a large, unique multi-ethnic sample of 6–7 month-olds (n = 174), with families from South Asian ethnic groups in the UK (Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi) being especially well represented. Consistent with previous data from less variable samples, no effects of SES on sleep latency or nocturnal sleep duration emerged. However, perinatal risk factors and ethnic differences did predict daytime sleep, sleep fragmentation and sleep-onset time. While these results should be interpreted with caution due to several limitations, they likely demonstrate that even when socio-economic status and ethnicity are much less confounded than in previous studies, they have a surprisingly limited impact on individual differences in sleep patterns in young infants

Applying gaze-contingent training within community settings to infants from diverse SES backgrounds

Even in infancy children from low-SES backgrounds differ in frontal cortex functioning and, by the start of pre-school, they frequently show poor performance on executive functions including attention control. These differences may causally mediate later difficulties in academic learning. Here, we present a study to assess the feasibility of using computerized paradigms to train attention control in infants, delivered weekly over five sessions in early intervention centres for low-SES families. Thirty-three 12-month-old infants were recruited, of whom 23 completed the training. Our results showed the feasibility of repeat-visit cognitive training within community settings. Training-related improvements were found, relative to active controls, on tasks assessing visual sustained attention, saccadic reaction time, and rule learning, whereas trend improvements were found on assessments of short-term memory. No significant improvements were found in task switching. These results warrant further investigation into the potential of this method for targeting ‘at-risk’ infants in community settings