C-Sections: They May Interrupt A Baby's Ability To Focus

Could Cesarean sections influence a child's ability to focus?

New findings published in Springer's journal Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics found that the birthing procedure slowed spatial attention in some babies, which may play a role in how well they are able to prioritize and focus on a particular object or area of interest.

Previous research has shown that certain factors influence a baby's development later in life, including birth weight and a mother's age. However, relatively little is known about how the actual birth event might influence a baby's cognitive and brain development.

In this study, researchers focused on two different experiments involving different groups of three-month-old infants. They monitored the children's eye movements as an indication of what caught the babies' attention and noted disruptions or changes in mechanisms involved in attention that would manifest in subsequent eye movement.

The first experiment involved a spatial cueing task that tested the stimulus-driven spatial attention of 24 babies. A peripheral cue was presented to the edge of their eye-line, indicating the subsequent location of a target stimulus, which activated the infants' saccadic eye movement so that their eyes turned faster towards the area in which the target was located.

"The stimulus-driven, reflexive attention and saccadic eye movement of those babies born via a Cesarean were found to be slowed compared to those of vaginally delivered infants. This is not because such babies try to more accurately select the right cues. The researchers believe it is because Cesarean delivered babies' brain development was impacted by their method of birth and their ability to initially allocate their spatial attention. It is still unclear whether this effect lasts throughout a lifetime," the researchers noted, in a news release.

However, they found no difference in the cognitively driven, voluntary attention of babies with different birth experiences, which followed the second experiment of a visual task that involved 12 babies. Stimuli appeared predictably and alternately on the left and right side of a monitor, which increased saccadic eye movement as the babies anticipated where the forthcoming stimulus might appear. These anticipated movements are linked to cognitive-driven spatial attention, according to researchers.

"The results suggests that birth experience influences the initial state of brain functioning and should, consequently, be considered in our understanding of brain development," concluded Adler.

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