Preterm Birth and Social Cognition
Condition: Preterm Children
MeSH terms: Premature Birth
Study type: Interventional

Summary: 
      The study aims at investigating social cognition outcomes of children born prematurely.
      Social cognition can be briefly defined as a process which underlines people's social and
      emotional behaviors. There are behavioral and cognitive evidences indicating that preterm
      children have executive dysfunctions. Executive functions refer to multiple cognitive
      processes that contribute to human higher order abilities, such as purposeful and
      future-orientated behavior. The literature regarding development of term born children
      indicates that executive functions are linked to the emergence of social cognition. Then, the
      investigators asked if children born prematurely, as they commonly present executive
      dysfunctions, would show an atypical development of social cognition. Additionally, as it has
      been shown that parental anxiety is a key factor of preterm children development, the
      investigators assumed that it should play a role in social cognition outcomes.
    

Detailed description: 
      The present study examines the social cognition development of very preterm children at 7 to
      10 years old. In the literature, there has yet to be any research on social cognition of
      children born prematurely while preterm children are usually described as having difficulties
      in social relations. The main hypothesis is that preterm children would present a deficit or
      a delay in the social cognition development in comparison with that of matched term children,
      and that this deficit or delay should be explained by executive dysfunctions and parental
      anxiety.

      Social cognition can be defined as the ability to understand the mind of other people and
      more specifically to perceive emotion, to have empathy, to attribute false-belief, to
      understand intended meaning, among others. In this study, the investigators will mainly focus
      on the ability of 80 very preterm children to understand the mind of others, well known as
      theory of mind in the literature, thanks to small stories involving the thinking and feelings
      of characters.

      The executive functioning, which refers to multiple processes underlying human higher order
      abilities, will be assessed thanks to standardized neuropsychological tests. In this study,
      the investigators will focus on the three main well known executive functions: inhibition,
      working memory and shifting. They expect, consistently with the literature, that preterm
      children will have executive dysfunctions, and that these will be linked to children theory
      of mind abilities.

      Finally, given that parental anxiety affects child development, the investigators plan to
      assess some psychological features of children's parents in our study, such the level of
      parental anxiety. They assume that this level will also be linked to theory of mind abilities
      of children.
    

Intervention name(s): Evaluation of the children's social cognitive development
Intervention type(s): Behavioral
Intervention description(s): standardized neuropsychological tests
Allocation: Randomized
Intervention model: Parallel Assignment
Masking: None (Open Label)
Primary purpose: Basic Science