A neuromarker of sustained attention from whole-brain functional connectivity

Abstract

Although attentional abilities vary widely and have profound everyday effects, a standardized measure of these abilities is lacking. This study introduces a new fMRI measure based on patterns of whole-brain connectivity, which predicts adults' attention performance and children's ADHD symptoms from data acquired while individuals are resting in the scanner.

Although attention plays a ubiquitous role in perception and cognition, researchers lack a simple way to measure a person's overall attentional abilities. Because behavioral measures are diverse and difficult to standardize, we pursued a neuromarker of an important aspect of attention, sustained attention, using functional magnetic resonance imaging. To this end, we identified functional brain networks whose strength during a sustained attention task predicted individual differences in performance. Models based on these networks generalized to previously unseen individuals, even predicting performance from resting-state connectivity alone. Furthermore, these same models predicted a clinical measure of attention—symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder—from resting-state connectivity in an independent sample of children and adolescents. These results demonstrate that whole-brain functional network strength provides a broadly applicable neuromarker of sustained attention.