Longitudinal Trajectories in Brain Function in Infancy

Silvia Rigato and Karla Holmboe of the University of Essex in the United Kingdom will track the development of attention and social skills in infants over time to enable the early identification of children with impairments. They will recruit 60 infants and analyze attention skills such as alertness monitored by heart rate, and social skills such as face perception monitored by eye tracking, from the last trimester of pregnancy through to 10 months old. In the future, these developmental trajectories will be used to help identify infants at risk of poor intellectual and social abilities.