Investigating socio-emotional cognition in late preterm children: A case-control study

ABSTRACT

This study aimed to investigate socio-emotional cognitive competence in late preterm and term born children. Late preterm children (n = 53; 5–10 years) and full-term control children (n = 53; 5–10 years) were evaluated on the four socio-emotional cognitive tests of the Intelligence and Development Scales (IDS): emotion recognition, emotion regulation, social understanding, and social behavioural competence. Compared to full-term children, late preterm children (LPT) performed significantly worse on the emotion recognition and social behavioural competence tasks, but otherwise, no significant differences were found in emotion regulation and social understanding tasks. These findings support the conclusion that late-preterm birth may be associated with negative, but selective, socio-emotional cognitive difficulties. Targeted interventions aimed to limit the incidence of these dysfunctions during childhood could be quite important for LPT children.     

Cognitive and psychomotor tests as predictors of on-road driving ability in older primary care patients

This study examined the accuracy with which different cognitive and psychomotor assessment tools were able to predict driving ability among older primary care patients. A cross-sectional study of 50 older drivers (with an average age of 73.1 ± 7.0 years) was conducted. Participants who had been referred by their physicians for psychological assessment following a fitness-to-drive examination underwent both an on-road driving test and a cognitive assessment protocol that included the Senior Drivers Battery (SDB) that is currently administered at the Mobility and Land Transports Institute (MLTI) in Portugal, the Useful Field of View (UFOV) test, the Stroke Drivers Screening Assessment (SDSA), Addenbrooke’s Cognitive Examination Revised (ACE-R), the Trail Making Test, the Key Search test, and the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS-III) Vocabulary and Block Design tests. Logistic regression analysis revealed that the performances of the participants on the SDSA, ACE-R, UFOV and SDB were the best predictors of on-road driving. Specific measures of processing speed and divided attention, visuospatial abilities, executive functions, psychomotor speed and global cognitive functioning may be useful for predicting unsafe driving. The practical implications of these findings are discussed with a view to developing new assessment models for determining driving fitness in older adults.     

Infants’ sense of approximate numerosity: Heritability and link to other concurrent traits

The ability to perceive approximate numerosity is present in many animal species, and emerges early in human infants. Later in life, it is moderately heritable and associated with mathematical abilities, but the etiology of the Approximate Number System (ANS) and its degree of independence from other cognitive abilities in infancy is unknown. Here, we assessed the phenotypic specificity as well as the influence of genetic and environmental factors on the ANS in a sample of 5-month-old twins (N = 514). We found a small-to-moderate but statistically significant effect of genetic factors on ANS acuity (heritability = 0.18, 95% CI: 0.02, 0.33), but only when differences in numerosity were relatively large (1:4 ratio). Non-verbal ability assessed with the Mullen Scales of Early Learning (MSEL) was found to be heritable (0.47; 95% CI: 0.34, 0.57) and the phenotypic association between ANS acuity and non-verbal ability performance was close to zero. Similarly, we found no association between ANS acuity and general attention during the task. An unexpected weak but statistically significant negative association between ANS acuity and scores on the receptive language scale of the MSEL was found. These results suggest that early ANS function may be largely independent from other aspects of non-verbal development. Further, variability in ANS in infancy seems to, to some extent, reflect genotypic differences in the population.

Highlights

• Assessing 514 infant twins with eye tracking, we found that infants' sense of approximate numerosity is heritable and not positively associated with concurrent attentional, cognitive or motor abilities.
• These results have implications for our understanding of development of mathematical ability and the link between cognitive abilities early in postnatal life.