Focused attention and active manipulation during object exploration: A longitudinal study between preterm and fullterm infants at 6, 9 and 12 months of age

Background: from 6 months of age the interest towards the objects in the proximal environment strongly increases, allowing the infant to experience episodes of prolonged focused attention and sophisticated manipulative exploration. Focused attention refers to the periods during which infants are visual-examining an object and shows to increase over the first few years of age. Active manipulation is considered as a pattern of tactile-behaviors performed by the infants for taking information about structure, shape and texture of the attended objects and it also increases in duration over the first year of age. Both focused attention and active manipulation are frequently impaired in pre-term (PT) infants compared to fullterm (FT). Since the two abilities are supposed to be the building blocks for the development of higher cognitive functions, it might be that early impairment in these domains would cause adverse outcomes at a later age. This study investigates this issue by examining early development of exploratory activity in both groups of infants. Aim and Hypothesis: - To compare focused attention and manipulative skills in FT and PT infants observed longitudinally at 6, 9 and 12 months of age during infant-object interaction. We expected differences between FT and PT infants in object exploration at each age, with PT performing worse than FT in focused attention and active manipulation.