Cognitive Processing in Preterm Infants and NICU Music Therapy

Following previous research, our hypothesis is that infants in the experimental group will display significantly more positive scores on a collection of physiological and behavioural measurements. The stimuli used at each age will be targeted to the infants' developmental level. Bayley Scales of Infant Development will also be administered at 18 - 24 months as part of high risk infant follow up. These data will be included in the analysis for outcome measurement. While seated in a high-chair or their parent's lap, infants will be habituated to a series of images of a particular shape (e.g., a triangle), while their looking time to each stimulus is measured. Each image during habituation will be a unique token of the category (i.e., all different triangles). Habituation will be individually determined, and defined as cumulative looking across three successive trials that is 50% than cumulative looking across the first three trials. Following habituation, infants will be shown a novel token of the habituation shape (e.g., a new triangle) and a novel shape (e.g., a square), in counterbalanced order. If infants recognize the category change, they should look longer at novel category compared to the novel token. For each test, two dependent measures will be sampled: rate of habituation and amount of dishabituation to the novel category. Mixed ANOVA and paired t-tests will be used to analyze the data. As preterm infants have been shown to be delayed on these kinds of tasks, we hypothesize that the experimental group will habituate to each category faster, and/or display stronger dishabituation scores compared to the preterm. We will also use multiple regression analyses to examine relations between the NICU physiological and behavioural measures and the cognitive measures. We hypothesize that infants who most strongly benefited from their therapies in the NICU will display the most advanced cognitive abilities. An intention-to-treat- analysis will be performed for cognitive measures as well. The cognitive assessment at 2 and 4 months that were to be carried out at the Developmental Lab at University of Regina is now canceled due to feasibility concerns.