Recent experiments with primates indicate that neonatal asphyxia may delay the onset of early visually guided behaviors, and cause visual spatial perceptual deficits in adulthood that correlate with specific neuropathology at autopsy.  An uncontrolled exploratory study in this laboratory suggested that human infants with a history of hypoxia neonatorum also may show significant delays in the onset of visual placing, and that results may be influenced by neurologic status at birth and gestational age.  The present research is to compare pre- and full-term infants with and without histories of neonatal hypoxia on the development of several visually guided responses, including visual placing, visually-guided reaching, and visual depth discrimination.  A principal goal is to test the hypothesis that functional visual responses may detect differences among hypoxic and non-hypoxic newborns better than traditional measures of cognitive functioning, and to open the way to further study of the links between early visual perceptual deficits and later developmental and learning problems in such newborns.  We plan to follow 100 pre- and full-term infants (50% with a history of neonatal hypoxia) from 5 mo until 9 mo of gestational age.  Each infant will be tested four times to trace the development of visually-guided reaching, visual placing, and visual depth avoidance (as measured by visual cliff depth perception threshold determinations).  Protocols will be used to perform blind scoring of videotaped records of infants responses.  A set of stringent criteria has been developed to classify infants according to birth history; and the sample will be matched for SES, sex, and race.  The proposed research is an initial step in testing an animal model for predicting developmental outcome in high-risk human newborns.  As such, it has significance for the secondary prevention of developmental handicaps.