Acute effects of feeding on cognition in healthy well-nourished newborn infants
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite considerable evidence in older populations that food intake can improve mental performance, little is known about the acute effects of feeding on cognition in the newborn period, a time when learning and memory are critical for discovering and adapting to everyday experiences. Feeding occurs well over 2500 times in the first year of life, raising the possibility that iterative effects on cognition may have cumulative effects over time. We recently demonstrated feeding enhancement of memory in two-to-three day old infants. Infants tested after a feed (versus before) displayed better memory for unfamiliar spoken words they previously habituated to and that were represented after a 100s delay. In this Doctoral Thesis, Studies 1 and 2 explore further the influence of feeding on short-term retention of spoken words. Memory was assessed using headturning and the Habituation-Recovery response. Study 1 extended the effect to older infants aged two-to-three weeks. Memory was enhanced after a feed over even longer delays, including 100s, 200s, 300s, 400s, and 500s. The overall gain in memory as measured by prefeed and postfeed differences at each delay was over two minutes long. Because newborn infants are more likely to hear recurrent words spoken by familiar voices, auditory experiences that they preferentially recognize, Study 2 looked at the separate effects of familiarity and feeding. Two day-old infants were assessed for either familiar speech-sound ("baby" spoken by the mother) or unfamiliar speech-sound from Study 1 ("beagle" spoken by a female stranger). The baby-mother sound stimulus was remembered better over a retention interval of 85 seconds than unfamiliar beagle-stranger, suggesting a strong influence of familiarity. To define the extent of the feeding effect, Study 3 examined sensorimotor processing of a reflex response. Three day-olds were assessed on habituation and retention of habituation of the glabella blink reflex over delays of 8s and l8s. No effect of feeding was found. Taken together, the implications of these findings are twofold. First, enhancement of memory for speech-sound by iterative feeding or recurrent exposure to familiar speech-sound stimuli may facilitate the acquisition of language. Second, feeding effects on cognition may depend on the nature of the task and previous experience with the stimulus. Further research is necessary for identifying what kinds of information and what processing abilities are more susceptible to the effects of feeding in early infancy.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".