Attention Control Training (ACT) and Very Preterm Infants

Summary

Infants' attention control, defined as the ability to select what to pay attention to, is a fundamental building block for developing learning abilities and behaviour self-regulation. Infants born before term (\<37 weeks gestation) display delays in attention control, and these delays cause cascade effects that include learning difficulties and behaviour problems. Infants born before 32 weeks of gestation, known as very preterm (VP), are particularly at risk of persistent difficulties in attention.

A ground-breaking early intervention, the Attention Control Training (ACT), targets infants' attention control. The novelty of the ACT lies in engaging young infants in "brain-training" using a computer interface, which tracks infants' gaze direction and presents training visual stimuli appropriate to the infants' ability level. Results demonstrate ACT improves attention of typically developing infants, contributing to improvements in other cognitive abilities (e.g. memory), but ACT has not been tested in clinical populations such as VP infants.

The investigators are running a feasibility study of the ACT intervention amongst VP infants aged 1 year (corrected age for prematurity). This feasibility study is necessary in order to adapt the ACT material and presentation to VP infants, and in particular to investigate the acceptability of a Randomised Trial and its training schedule by parents of VP infants.

The proposed study will allow the investigators to identify solutions to problems, ensuring the ACT material and delivery are customised for VP infants.

Conditions

• Very Premature Baby

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Attention Control Training

Infants watch interactive cartoons that respond to infants' direction of gaze. An eye-tracker records the infant's eye movements in real time, relaying this information to the computer. These presentations trigger motivating stimuli (cartoon animations with child-friendly sounds) every time the infant fulfills the demands of a task (e.g. when the infant looks at a character on the screen avoiding to be distracted by other objects moving across the screen). The length of training sessions varies depending on infants' engagement with stimuli and time criteria.

BEHAVIORAL

Control

The control procedure involves presentation of cartoons on a screen, while infants' gaze direction is recorded using the same eye-tracker and camera. The crucial difference is that the cartoons in this case are not interactive, thus do not change depending on infants' gaze direction. To ensure presentations in the control procedure are similar in length to those of the intervention group, infants in the control group are matched infant-by-infant and visit-by-visit with participants in the ACT treatment group: Infants in the control group see a replay of the session of the matched treated infant. Therefore, while the presentation is exactly the same (i.e. same length and same stimuli) for the treated and the control child, in the latter case the presentation is not interactive (i.e. not generated contingently on the infants' visual behaviour).

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Public Health Agency, Health and Social Care Research and Development

  collaborator OTHER

• TinyLife

  collaborator OTHER

• Queen's University, Belfast

  lead OTHER

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

OTHER

Masking

DOUBLE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

11 Months

Max Age

13 Months

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2018-03-11

Primary Completion

2019-06-28

Completion

2020-03-11

Countries

• United Kingdom

Study Locations