Applying gaze-contingent training within community settings to infants from diverse SES backgrounds

Even in infancy children from low-SES backgrounds differ in frontal cortex functioning and, by the start of preschool, they frequently show poor performance on executive functions including attention control. These differences may causally mediate later difficulties in academic learning. Here, we present a study to assess the feasibility of using computerized paradigms to train attention control in infants, delivered weekly over five sessions in early intervention centres for low-SES families. Thirty-three 12-month-old infants were recruited, of whom 23 completed the training. Our results showed the feasibility of repeat-visit cognitive training within community settings. Training-related improvements were found, relative to active controls, on tasks assessing visual sustained attention, saccadic reaction time, and rule learning, whereas trend improvements were found on assessments of short-term memory. No significant improvements were found in task switching. These results warrant further investigation into the potential of this method for targeting ‘at-risk’ infants in community settings.

Defining ‘Community’ for Community Translation

Unlike community interpreting, community translation engages with the members of the community both at individual and group levels. This duality of the process makes the identification of the community as a socio-cultural entity and of its individual members all the more important. There have been several attempts to define the concept of ‘community’ in different professional and academic contexts. Mindful of the difficulty of defining community, the paper proposes three methods that can help community translators in visualizing the characteristics of the intended audience and in making informed translation decisions. The three methods, derived from user-centred translation, are scrutinized using a case study based on a real-life National Health Service (NHS) text.