Heidelise Als, PhD
Associate Professor of Psychology
Harvard Medical School/Children's Hospital
Department of Psychiatry

MRRC Project(s)

R01 HD38261-01
Neurodevelopment and Experience: Behavior, qEEG and MRI

Advances in perinatal and newborn intensive care have greatly decreased the mortality rates for high-risk newborns and preterm infants. The challenge confronting the professional caring for these infants in the Newborn Intensive Care Unit (NICU) is not only to assure survival, but to support the developmental outcome of the infants.

From neurobehavioral and neuroelectrophysiological studies performed by our group and others, it is clear that the preterm infant at school age emerges as significantly more at risk for attentional deficit disorder, lower IQ, difficulties in social-emotional functioning and self-regulation, and increased need for specialized school services. These differences may be attributable at least in part to the difference in sensory experience of the immature nervous system when cared for outside the uterus before term. The hypothesis that we have derived from these findings is that environmental input may lead to altered pathway development due to unexpected and overwhelming sensory experience, which in turn, may lead to deviant developmental functioning, especially of association cortical areas. The aims of our research are firstly to assess the immature nervous system’s readiness for sensory input and to document the infant’s current active behavioral efforts towards developmental differentiation and thresholds to disorganization, and secondly, to test the effectiveness of a behaviorally-based approach to modifying environment and caregiving in keeping with an individual infant’s current thresholds to disorganization.