Previous studies have evidenced that premature infants exhibit deficits in visual prediction (Emberson et al., 2017) and motor development (Hughes et al., 2016), but the link between both abilities in preterm infants remains unexplored. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the development of predictive abilities and its relation to motor skills in premature infants. We hypothesise that full-term infants will demonstrate higher prediction and motor performances (similar to Schwarzer et al., 2013) compared to preterm infants.
Thus, we will test full-term and preterm infants between 9 and 12 months of age using (i) mental rotation (MR) task and (ii) visual-spatial prediction task.
In the MR task, infants will be habituated to a video of rotating Shepard-Metzler object (0° to 239°), followed by alternative test videos of the unseen angle (240° to 359°) of the habituation object and its mirror object (Gerhard et al., 2021). Preferential looking will be used to measure MR. Similar to Kubicek et al.’s (2017) task with real objects, a novel visual-spatial prediction task will be used. In this task, a box with targets on the left and right side rotates around the vertical axis periodically occluding and revealing the targets. Anticipatory looking, an indicator of visual prediction, will be measured using a stationary eye tracker. Motor skills will be assessed by using the Bayley Scales of Infant Development (Bayley, 2006).
The findings of this study could aid in developing early intervention programs to improve motor skills and predictive abilities in premature infants, potentially bridging developmental gaps.