Cognitive development occurs as a linked cascade of emerging skills, but how the visual abilities of infants contribute to cognitive function later in childhood has yet not been investigated. Here, Stjerna et al. studied the link between visual fixation performance in newborns and later cognitive function. Children that had good visual fixation scores as newborns performed better in visual motor and visual reasoning tasks at 2 and 5 years of age, respectively, than those with poor visual fixation as newborns. Thus, visual fixation in infancy can serve as a predictor of later cognitive outcomes.
References
Stjerna, S. et al. Visual fixation in human newborns correlates with extensive white matter networks and predicts long-term neurocognitive development. J. Neurosci. 35, 4824–4829 (2015)
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Carr, F. Visual fixation predicts function. Nat Rev Neurosci 16, 248 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn3959
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn3959