Social cognitive abilities are affected by preterm birth, but pathways to, and risk factors for this outcome are not well mapped. A new study published in the journal Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviewse examines direct assessment tasks including objective coding of parent-child play to chart social development in infancy and pre-school years. A systematic search and data-extraction procedure yielded seventy-nine studies (4930 preterm and 2109 term children, aged birth - five years), for inclusion. The authors detected a pattern of reduced social attention in the first 12 months of life with evidence of reduced performance in social cognitive tasks later in the preschool years. However, they did not identify a consistent, distinctive preterm social phenotype in early life. Instead, the interactive behaviour of preterm infants reflects factors from outside the social cognitive domain, such as attention, language, and socioeconomic status. By combining data across samples and measures we revealed the role of domain-general skills, which may in future prove fruitful intervention targets. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)
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