Orienting and Alerting Attention in Very Low and Normal Birth Weight Children at 42 Months: A Follow-up Study

In preterm and very low birth weight (VLBW) infants, attention-related problems have been found to be more pronounced and emerge later as academic difficulties that may persist into school age. In response, based on three attention networks: alerting, orienting, and executive attention, we examined the development of attention functions at 42 months (not corrected for prematurity) as a follow-up study of VLBW (n = 23) and normal birth weight (NBW: n = 48) infants.

The alerting and orienting attention networks were examined through an overlap task with or without warning signal. The orienting network was also examined through the distribution of gaze points when exposed to videos of human faces talking and silently looking straight ahead. Executive attention was examined using a parental report measure for temperamental self-regulation, effortful control.

In the overlap task, the difference between VLBWs and NBWs was not the latency of attentional disengagement but the fact that VLBWs were less focused on the fixation stimulus (F(1,60) = 10.80, p < .01, η² = .071) and seemed to profit more from auditory warning signals than NBWs (F(1,60) = 7.13, p = .01, η² = .106). Moreover, there was no intergroup difference regarding lateral (right or left) or feature (eye or mouth) attention bias toward the face videos. Further, longer latencies in overlap condition were significantly positively associated with high effortful control scores only in the NBW group (r = .36, p = .018).

Results indicate that poor underlying alertness and orienting relating to atypical lateralization may affect cognitive and behavioral abnormalities in VLBWs.