Spatial skills in children born preterm

Children born preterm (<37 weeks gestation) often face a range of neuro-developmental challenges. One area that has received comparatively little attention is spatial skills - the abilities that help us to perceive, interpret, transform and mentally manipulate spatial information, enabling individuals to understand, interact with and navigate the physical world. These skills are fundamental for academic learning, particularly in STEM subjects. Niamh Gaynor's ( lab member and Trainee Educational Psychologist) research explores whether children born preterm show differences in spatial abilities compared to their full-term peers, and what this might mean for their learning and development.

One part of Niamh's research is a meta-analysis that brings together existing studies to answer a key question - Do children born preterm present with spatial skill differences, and what factors might explain variations in findings? The results of the findings suggest that children born preterm do indeed present with weaker spatial skills when compared to their term-born peers, and that this gap widens for children born extremely preterm (<28 weeks GA) and very preterm (<32 weeks GA).

Another part of Niamh's research involves an empirical study, which seeks to build on this by exploring how these spatial differences might relate to children's early mathematical ability. Since spatial skills are known to play a key role in numeracy, this study hopes to examine whether the space-maths relationship holds in children born preterm using Millennium Cohort data.