COGNITIVE DEFICITS IN HIGH RISK INFANTS

This proposal is designed to continue our efforts to improve the
identification of infants at risk for cognitive deficits and to better
understand the nature and extent of the newly uncovered infant-child
continuities in intellectual functioning. These recent demonstrations of
predictive validity from infancy into later childhood are of enormous
theoretical significance, indicating that cognitive abilities can be
assessed in infancy, that individual differences in these abilities can be
detected, and that some of these differences are related to later
cognition. The primary aim of the present proposal is to begin to elucidate the basis
for this continuity. Our strategy for doing this will be to examine
measures of four cognitive processes that are thought to be implicated in
the cross-age relations uncovered to date. These are the following:
memory, speed of information processing, attention, and representational
competence. Differences in any or all of these could underlie individual
differences in infant information processing as well as the relations that
have been observed between infant measures and later IQ. These aims will
be pursued in a longitudinal study of fullterms and high-rink preterms
(