The impact of prematurity on visual attention: how Gestational Age influences disengagement in toddlerhood.

Preterm birth, an early birth before the pregnancy is completed, is a very common condition that affect almost the 10 % of all live births. Together with the burden that this condition brings to families and health systems, it significantly impacts the neurodevelopment, leading to an increased risk for long-term difficulties in cognition and behavior. Prematurity represents a biological vulnerability for the development of neural and cognitive system and research should focus on finding early markers that could predict some of the adverse consequences associated with prematurity. That is why in the present work we investigated attentional capacities, which represent a good early marker of atypical neurodevelopment. With my final dissertation I intend to empirically support that gestational age at birth is an early key predictor of differences in attentional performance observed later along development. To pursue this aim, the study that we conducted and that I will here report explored the impact of gestational age on visual attention, in particular on orienting capacities, in a sample of late preterm and full-term toddlers. We administered a Gap-Overlap task to a group of 35 toddlers at 16 months born between the 34 and 41 weeks of gestation. Their performance was measured in terms of rapidity to orient attention to the target and number of failures to disengage from the center of the screen; then we analyzed how gestational age, taken as a continuous variable, could impact on attentional task performance. What we found was that orienting capacities varied depending on gestational age; specifically, the results associated lower gestational ages with less rapidity to orient visual attention and worst endogenous control of attention. Our findings supported the need to further investigate early attentional development also in the population of late prematurity, because these early difficulties could have a detrimental impact on later cognitive and behavioral development.