New paper in Child Development!

I looked at data from preterm infants (thanks to Theirworld Edinburgh Birth Cohort) to ask: can social gaze act as a marker of lateralisation differences at 8-10 months in preterm infants?

The paper in a nutshell: Cerebral lateralisation is the development of specialised processes for the left and right hemispheres of the brain and is an indication of typical brain development. Lateralisation differences are linked to atypical social development in conditions such as autism. Based on the fact that preterm birth is closely linked with altered brain development and social difficulties in childhood, we aimed to find out whether we could identify early lateralisation differences in preterm infants using eye-tracking data.

To do this, we used Theirworld data to explore whether children born preterm, in comparison to children born at term, exhibited differences in the time they spent looking to faces versus objects in the left or right visual field. We analysed data from two eye-tracking tasks featuring social and non-social content with 51 preterm and 61 term-born infants aged 8-10 months.

Infants born preterm showed a significantly reduced interest in social stimuli on the left versus the right compared to term children. These differences are indicative of atypical development of visual field biases, and therefore provide evidence of altered cerebral lateralisation in infancy in preterm infants. This reduction in left looking is the opposite pattern that we would expect to see in typical development. It is possible that this finding could be a physiological marker of early processing differences, and indicative of emerging lateralisation differences that are seen across the lifespan in people born preterm. The study takes us one step closer to being able to identify early children who may go on to need additional support, and they shed new light on the neural basis of learning.