Desenvolvimento sociocognitivo e psicomotor em bebês prematuros: avaliações comportamentais e de rastreamento visual aos 12 meses de idade

Abstract

Prematurity is one of the major global public health problems, constituting an important risk factor for the development of medical problems as well as cognitive, motor and socio-emotional deficits that may persist into adolescence and adulthood. Among the recent technological advancements focused on early diagnosis of neurodevelopmental problems, the use of eye-tracking has shown great promise in the study of social cognition in typical and atypical samples. The aim of this study was to evaluate the early psychomotor and sociocognitive development of preterm infants at 12 months, in comparison to a group of full-term infants. The sample was composed of 38 infants, being 24 preterm and 14 full-term. The Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development-III were used to assess infants’ psychomotor development. Regarding their socio-cognitive abilities, these were assessed using eye tracking technique, where infants were presented with sequences of pictures with congruous or incongruous endings, as well as social and non-social videos. In what concerns the psychomotor evaluation, preterm infants reached significantly lower scores than their full-term counterparts in the language and motor scales, but no significant differences were found between the groups at the cognitive scale level. Regarding the eye-tracking data, no significant differences were observed between the mean fixation time in social videos and random videos either in the preterm or full-term groups. Marginally significant differences between the groups were shown in mean fixation time in random videos, where full-term infants tended to attend longer than preterm infants. No statistically significant differences were found between the groups in fixation time in social videos. Regarding the second eye-tracking task, there were no significant intragroup differences in mean fixation times towards congruous and incongruous endings. Furthermore, the groups did not differ significantly in the amount of fixation time on images with congruous and incongruous endings. Although it did not reach statistical significance, it is noteworthy that the premature group attended 32% less time (on average) to the incongruous endings, compared to their full-term counterparts. Our results expand the knowledge on the development of preterm infants in the first year of life, evidencing that prematurity may adversely affect early development, in addition to uncovering visual tracking patterns of the groups under study. Thus, future studies should be conducted to better describe the influence of prematurity in dimensions of childhood development. Furthermore, additional studies using eye-tracking technology may extend the use of this promising tool to samples of typical and atypical infants and children.