Title

L'atteinte de l‘objet chez l’enfant né prematuré / Reaching for objects in prematurely born infants

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

3-2012

Department 1

Psychology

Abstract

Healthy full-term and preterm infants were longitudinally tested in a reaching task. Full-term infants were tested at 6, 8, and 10 months of age and preterm infants were tested at 8, 10, and 12 months of corrected age. In the first part of each testing session, infants were tested reaching for a single novel object. In the second phase of the session infants were tested with a pair of objects, one of which was familiar in that it was the object that was presented in the first phase and the other was a new object. Infants’ responses to target novelty were comparable in both groups and the movement and grasp times, and the number of speed peaks were also similar. However, other measures could not be easily reconciled between groups. For example, the full-term infants showed a decrease in movement speed as has been observed in other experiments, while the preterm infants started with very slow reaching speeds and showed an increase in movement speed with age. These findings suggest that full-term infants and preterm infants can best be described as having different trajectories of development.

DOI

10.4074/S0013754512001048

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