The Multimodal Nature of Early Experiences in High and Low-risk Infants: What’s going on in the Tiny Minds of Infants?

Endowed with a mind and body of their own, infants are capable to explore the world around them and achieve an intelligence that seems amazing. How do infants achieve such complex abilities? To discern the dynamics of development, our lab examines how the rich multisensory nature of early experiences are a major driver of change in the complex heterogeneous system of cognition. More broadly, the talk is centred on understanding how these early experiences can provide a new perspective to identify early markers of neurodevelopmental differences in high-risk infants.

Our lab specialises in investigating the early origins of multimodal attentional processes from naturalistic observations of mother-child interactions along with deriving looking-time measures from eye tracking using intermodal preferential looking paradigms (IPLP) in lowand high-risk infants (preterm < 36 weeks gestational age, IUGR etc.). Specifically, the talk will highlight findings from two specific studies. The first study examines mother-child interactions to examine infants’ attention to caregivers' communicative behaviours. Furthermore, the emphasis of the second study is to understand the development of multimodal attention from analysis of variations in gaze fixations in a cross-sectional sample of high and low-risk infants at 3, 6 and 9 months of age. Overall, these studies offer valuable insights into early cognitive differences among high-risk infants, providing essential data for identifying potential markers of cognitive development.