Attentional Measures of Memory in Typically Developing and Hypoxic-Ischemic Injured Infants.

Jennifer B Wagner,Agatha Norwood,Charles A Nelson,Adeline Jabès

doi:10.3390/brainsci10110823

Abstract

Hypoxic–ischemic injury (HII) at birth has been found to relate to differences in development, including decreased memory performance. The current study assessed recognition memory in 6- and 12-month-old HII infants and typically developing (TD) infants using two eye-tracking paradigms well suited to explore explicit memory processes early in life: visual paired comparison (VPC) and relational memory (RM). During the VPC, infants were familiarized to a face and then tested for their novelty preference immediately and after a two-minute delay. At 6 months, neither HII nor TD showed a VPC novelty preference at immediate delay, but at 12 months, both groups did; after the two-minute delay, no group showed a novelty preference. During RM, infants were presented with blocks containing a learning phase with three different scene–face pairs, and a test phase with one of the three scenes and all three faces appearing simultaneously. When there was no interference from other scene–face pairs between learning and test, 6-month-old TD showed evidence of an early novelty preference, but when there was interference, they revealed an early familiarity preference. For 12-month-old TD, some evidence for a novelty preference during RM was seen regardless of interference. Although HII and TD showed similar recognition memory on the VPC, when looking at RM, HII infants showed subtle differences in their attention to the familiar and novel faces as compared to their TD peers, suggesting that there might be subtle differences in the underlying memory processing mechanisms between HII and TD. More work is needed to understand how these attentional patterns might be predictive of later memory outcomes.

Highlights

Hypoxic–ischemic injury (HII), which occurs in 1–6/1000 live full-term births, results in increased risk for neonatal mortality and later neurodevelopmental disabilities [1,2]
Memory impairments in children who have experienced perinatal HII may be present from the time of the injury but may go unnoticed until they enter school because relatively few demands are placed on memory during infancy or early childhood
12-month-old infants who hadeye-tracking experienced to perinatal hypoxic–ischemic injury memory and a group of typically

Summary

Introduction

Hypoxic–ischemic injury (HII), which occurs in 1–6/1000 live full-term births, results in increased risk for neonatal mortality and later neurodevelopmental disabilities [1,2]. Many previous human studies have demonstrated atrophy of the hippocampal formation and memory impairments following HII [8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16], these alterations have not been noted to occur until school age [17]. One explanation for this could be that the hippocampal formation exhibits a late maturation lasting into young adulthood, with. Most studies have used standardized scales to assess episodic memory and might have missed other explicit memory functions emerging at younger ages [18]

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion