The candidate has over 25 years nursing experience. The proposed award would allow the applicant to receive multi-disciplinary training in research to better understand the complex array of factors related to the development of attention regulation in children born of extremely low birth weight (ELBW). The proposed program will examine the development of self-regulation by a variety of methods and begin to develop longitudinal methods to examine attention regulation. Selection and use of attention strategies will be used as one way of examining self- regulation. Most studies examining cognitive development in ELBW children focus on more general measures of functioning. It has been well established that ELBW children who are of """"""""normal"""""""" intelligence differ from their peers in performance on IG tests and measures of academic performance. In addition, they demonstrate deficits on attention measures. Research to date has not examined the use of attention strategies in these children. An understanding of how ELBW children select and use attention strategies and the factors that influence such strategy utilization is needed to understand the differential cognitive development expressed by individuals within this population. The impact of environmental factors on general measures of cognitive functioning in ELBW infants has been reported, but it is not known how the environment alters outcomes. In order to understand the underlying processes, more data are needed related to specific characteristics of the parent, child, and environment that might influence the care-giving environment and the specific characteristics of the psychosocial environment that may be related to self-regulation.
Aim 1 : To replicate and extend findings from pilot work demonstrating that ELBW children had deficits in patterns of attention strategy use. a. To characterize patterns of attention strategy use and memory performance in a same different task before and after an intervention that teachers the most efficient strategy. b. To determine the extent to which child factors influence spontaneous strategy use and response in training.
Aim 2 : To characterize patterns of parent-child interaction in a problem- solving (puzzle completion) task. a. To identify specific characteristics of the parent-child interaction that may be related to self-regulation in a puzzle completion task. b. To determine what characteristics of the environment, child, and parent influence the parent-child interaction.
