The objective of the study was to explore the effect of earlyinfant exposure to the Numbers in Nappies programme onthe infants’ cognitive performance as measured on the BSID(III). An intervention and a control group of infants wereassessed with the BSID (III) at the beginning of the study andagain after approximately two months. In this time period,the Numbers in Nappies programme was implemented forthe intervention group.There were numerical increases on the cognitive subscalesfor the intervention group after the implementation ofthe programme. However, this increase was only significantin the case of the Cognitive Scale. When comparing theperformance of the two groups on the cognitive subscales, nosignificant differences were found before the intervention.Only in the case of the Cognitive Scale was a significantdifference found after the intervention. No significant resultwas found for the Language Scale and the Motor Scale.Numerical increases were noted for the intervention group onthe Adaptive Behaviour Scale and the Social-Emotional Scale.The significant improvement on the Cognitive Scale for thoseinfants who did the intervention programme is supported byvarious studies (e.g. Campbell & Ramey 1994; Chickgoudar& Khadi 2001; Murray et al. 2016). In these studies, significantimprovements were reported in the cognitive developmentof the infants in the experimental group after intervention.Greater awareness of the role of cognitive stimulation wasprobably created by the intervention programme, resultingin the significantly higher score for the intervention group incomparison with the control group.TABLE 2: Statisticsa,b for subscale comparisons in the intervention group (N = 29)before and after the intervention programme.Cognitive2 Cognitive1 Language2 Language1 Motor2 Motor1Z -4.32c -1.68c -0.76cp (two-tailed) 0.00** 0.09 0.45aControl/intervention = intervention.bWilcoxon signed-rank test.cBased on negative ranks.**p ≤ 0.05.TABLE 3: Test statistics for the comparison of the in