Associations between contaminants and infant performance.
Table 3 summarizes the results from the regression analyses examining the associations between contaminant exposure and infant performance.
With adjustment for covariates, we found several statistically significant associations among DE and DAP measured during pregnancy and infant performance scores from the NNNS subscales.
Our analyses also demonstrated that the SRT index introduced in this study has moderate stability in infancy, supporting the utility of this metric in quantifying individual infant performance.
The COPM is an individualised, criterion referenced tool measuring perceived change in infant performance and parental satisfaction with performance over time on family priorities.
With the exception of one item (Communication 5), all differing items had lower values (lower infant performance) in the present study.
The infants' performance was scored based on 7 factors: habituation, orientation, motor behaviour, range of state, regulation of state, autonomic stability and abnormal reflexes.
Schacter and Moscovitch (1984) reviewed data from numerous VPC studies available at the time and concluded that variables such as retention interval did not appear to alter infants' performance (e.g. Fagan, 1971, 1973).
However, the data presented here, showing that 9-month-old infants do expect an agent to continue to pursue a previously chosen object in the presence of new objects, if the action they had observed was efficiently related to the outcome, contradicts that view, suggesting instead that infants' performance on those tasks reflected a failure to attribute any goal in the first place.
Similarly, variables that influence adults' performance on declarative memory tasks, such as interference, levels of processing and serial position, also impact infants' performance on the deferred imitation task (Hayne, 2007b), leading to the same conclusion, that all three of these paradigms appear to tap into declarative, as opposed to nondeclarative, processes (Hayne, 2004).
In addition, Hayne et al. (2000) demonstrated that when either the form or the colour of a puppet was changed at test (relative to the original demonstration), 6- and 12- (but not 18-) month old infants' performance at retrieval was disrupted, while a major change in context between the study and the test phases left 6- (but not 12- or 18-) month old infants impaired.
