Inferential functioning in visually impaired children

Neurodevelopmental assessments used to measure preschoolers' cognitive development in Latin America: a systematic review

OBJECTIVE

The objective of this study was to systematically review the standardized neurodevelopmental assessments used to study preschool-aged children's cognitive development in Spanish-speaking Latin America.

METHODS

The authors systematically searched PubMed, PsycINFO, and ERIC databases for peer-reviewed articles from Spanish-speaking Latin American countries. Articles were included if they measured cognitive development among children aged 2-6 years using at least one standardized assessment tool; 97 articles were included and reviewed in accordance with PRISMA guidelines to assess their use of these tools.

RESULTS

Ninety-seven studies across 13 countries used a total of 41 assessments to measure cognitive development; most widely used were the Wechsler intelligence scales (n = 46/97), particularly the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence and Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (n = 23 and 29, respectively). Other common assessments included the McCarthy Scales of Children's Abilities (n = 9), Raven's Progressive Matrices (n = 9), Child Neuropsychological Assessment (n = 8), and Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (n = 7). In regions where normative data for a given assessment were unpublished, authors commonly used norms from the United States, Mexico, or Spain or did not report standard scores in their analyses.

CONCLUSIONS

The wide range of tools used in these studies presents a challenge for generalizing results when measuring the neurodevelopment of Latin American preschool-aged children. The low availability of normative data for specific regions reveals concerns if some tools are culturally and linguistically appropriate even when Spanish is a common language, particularly in low-resource settings. Future work to forge greater consistency in the use of validated measures, clarity in reporting research methods, and publication of regional normative data would benefit the field.

When the body is time: spatial and temporal deixis in children with visual impairments and sighted children

While there is mounting evidence explaining how concrete concepts are processed, the evidence demonstrating how abstract concepts are processed is rather scant. Most research illustrating how concrete and abstract concepts are processed has been obtained from adult populations. Consequently, not much is known about how these concepts are processed by children, especially those with sensorimotor impairments. This paper reports a study in which groups of children who were either visual-motor impaired (VMG), blind (BG), or sighted (CG) were requested to perform deictic gestures for temporal and spatial concepts. The results showed that: (i) spatial pointing was performed faster than temporal pointing across all groups of children; (ii) such difference in pointing times occurred also within groups; and (iii) the slowest pointing times were those of the blind children followed by the VMG and the CG children, respectively. Additionally, while CG children correctly performed the pointing tasks, VMG and, particularly, BG children relied on a form of deixis known as autotopological (or personal) deixis. The results thus suggest that deprivation or lack of sensorimotor experience with the environment affects the processing of abstract concepts and that a compensatory mechanism may be to rely on the body as a reference frame.