Thinking about social and nonsocial alternative possibilities in premature preschoolers

ABSTRACT

Introduction: Prematurely born preschoolers show developmental cognitive delay compared to full-term children. There are important neurological networks developing at preschool age related to perspective taking about the attribution of belief and to deduction with contrary-to-fact situations. Other deductive abilities may be completed during that period. Method: A group of very prematurely born children (N = 35) aged between 4 and 5 years was compared with a control group of children born at full term (N = 35). They completed different cognitive tasks that required making inferences about possible true facts and false facts, and about others’ beliefs. Results: Results showed that preterm children had more difficulties with false beliefs and counterfactual tasks than the controls but they did not differ in equivalent deductive tasks. Conclusions: We discuss the possible difficulties of preterm children when they first reach primary school age, not only with social perspective taking, but also with considering nonsocial contrary-to-fact alternatives. Prematurity is not a syndrome, but could be a risk condition. Therefore, these results are relevant in the field of differential diagnosis—in particular, for children with difficulties in perspective taking, a condition with which children born prematurely could share some characteristics.

KEYWORDS:

• Inferences
• Neuropsychological profile
• Perspective taking
• Prematurity
• Theory of mind

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness [grant number PSI2015-63505-P].