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The attentive brain: insights from developmental cognitive neuroscience
Dima Amso1 and Gaia Scerif2
Abstract | Visual attention functions as a filter to select environmental information for learning and memory, making it the first step in the eventual cascade of thought and action systems. Here, we review studies of typical and atypical visual attention development and explain how they offer insights into the mechanisms of adult visual attention. We detail interactions between visual processing and visual attention, as well as the contribution of visual attention to memory. Finally, we discuss genetic mechanisms underlying attention disorders and how attention may be modified by training.
The world is cluttered with more information than can be processed at once. Attention is defined as a process or computation that is applied to competing environmental information, the result of which is to bias selection and action to one option while simul taneously filtering interference from the remaining alternatives14. Framing attention as a computation is useful because it explains how attention processes can be carried out on a range of sensory inputs, as well as on moreabstract representations. For exam ple, visual attention can bias selection of information about objects, such as particular features or locations. Attention can also act to select goals for action from the contents of working memory. In all these cases, attention processes determine what information is selected for subsequent perception, action, learning and memory, imposing a crucial processing bottleneck. It is there fore one of the moststudied mechanisms in the adult cognitive neurosciences.
However, a complete understanding of attention processes must also include an understanding of their developmental origins. In this Review, we highlight how studying developing rather than developed attentional states broadens our understanding of attention mecha nisms and forces a shift in focus from considering atten tion as an isolated process towards an understanding of its links with perception and memory, as well as its genetic constraints and malleability. We discuss studies of typical development of attention processes and stud ies of neurodevelopmental disorders in which attention processes are atypical. It is important to note that atten tion operates in various sensory modalities. Here, we focus largely on cortical mechanisms of visual atten tion development, but we suggest...