Colorado State University will receive approximately $3 million from the National Institutes of Health to study children with Down syndrome.

Researchers Deborah Fidler and Lisa Daunhauer will use two grants to identify early indications of attention deficits in children with Down syndrome and best ways to measure cognitive function.

The partner organizations in the studies include Drexel University, the University of Arizona and Colorado’s Children’s Hospital.

“Our findings will help researchers conduct treatment work by giving them a validated set of measures that can capture, with accuracy, whether executive function is improving or not,” Daunhauer said.

Approximately one in 700 babies is born with Down syndrome. It occurs when an individual has a full or partial extra chromosome, which alters the trajectory of that person’s development.

The study will involve 210 children and observing their executive responses to play-based activity.

“Some of these games require that you resist your automatic response and choose a more considered response,” Fidler said. “How well do you resist what comes automatically to produce a response that is more regulated?”