Journal Article Report:
Processing Speed in the 1st Year of Life
Background
In earlier studies it has been suggested that individual differences in processing speed has
its roots in infancy. Also in those studies it was suggested that preterm infants were significantly
slower with processing and memory skills than full-term infants. The study that was done in this
paper was to prove whether or not infants of preterm and full-term pregnancies had any effect on
their processing speed and memory abilities. Several aspects of attention were also tested. In this
particular study the preterms were compared to the full-terms on many levels. I will discuss a few
of those comparisons.
Hypothesis
The hypothesis of the students performing this study was that infants of preterm
pregnancies would be dramatically slower than those of full-term pregnancies, just as found in the
earlier studies.
Methods
The subjects tested in this study consisted of 153 full-terms (75 female, 78 male), 144 of
them returned at 7 months (72 female, 72 male), and 126 of them returned at 12 months (61
female, 65 male).
infant
A smiling baby lying in a soft cot (furniture).
English: An intubated female premature infant born...The amount of preterms were a follows, 50 infants at 5 months (26 female, 24
male), 59 infants at 7 months (28 female, 31 male), and 56 at 12 months ( 25 female, 31 male).
The preterms and full-terms all had similar demographic backgrounds: gender, birth order,
parental education, and ethnicity. All the infants were tested in a three-sided booth made of panels
of black fabric. There was a display panel that allowed the observer to know what was going on.
At 5, 7, and 9 months the infants were shown 19 black and white photographs, all of the same
size. One of the 19 photos was a familiar face to the child being tested. All the children sat on a...