Number Processing in Infants and Children Born Very Preterm

Individuals born very preterm (<32 weeks; VP) have notably poorer attainment in mathematics than their term-born peers. Only a handful of studies have investigated basic numerical skills in VP children and the underlying mechanisms associated with problems with mathematics in this population are still not fully comprehended. Basic processes underlying numerical cognition can go awry very early in development and there is a lack of knowledge of early trajectories of acquisition of numerical skills in infants born prematurely. This thesis reports on a series of studies investigating number processing in very preterm infants and children. These make use of a combination of tools, such as neurodevelopmental assessments, eye-tracking, event-related-potentials, neuropsychological evaluations and experimental tasks. Specifically, cross-sectional studies investigated numerical sensitivity in VP infants aged six and twelve months. Behavioural and electrophysiological measures assessing a range of domain-general and domain-specific skills associated with mathematics performance were also investigated in VP school-aged children. The results showed that, during the first year of post-natal life, VP infants do not exhibit differential developmental trajectories in the basic ability to discriminate numerosities compared to infants born at full term, although they required a longer time to discriminate the new number of elements. Later in development, school-aged VP children demonstrated difficulties in processing basic numerical information. Electrophysiological data demonstrated that this might be associated with deficits in sensory and attention resources and not necessarily in how VP children encode number-related information. Difficulties in processing numerical information, however, have only a marginal impact on their performance in mathematics. We tentatively conclude that difficulties in mathematics in individuals born very prematurely are largely associated with domain-general skills