Attention recruits frontal cortex in human infants

Abstract

Young infants learn about the world by overtly shifting their attention to perceptually salient events. In adults, attention recruits several brain regions spanning the frontal and parietal lobes. However, these regions are thought to have a protracted maturation and so it is unclear whether they are recruited in infancy and, more generally, how infant attention is supported by the brain. We used event-related fMRI with 24 awake behaving infants 3-12 months old while they performed a child-friendly attentional cuing task. A target was presented to either the left or right of the infant's fixation and eye-tracking was used to measure the latency with which they saccaded to the target. To manipulate attention, a brief cue was presented before the target in three conditions: on the same side as the upcoming target (valid), on the other side (invalid), or on both sides (neutral). All infants were faster to look at the target on valid versus invalid trials, with valid faster than neutral and invalid slower than neutral, indicating that the cues effectively captured attention. We then compared the fMRI activity evoked by these trial types. Regions of adult attention networks activated more strongly for invalid than valid trials, particularly frontal regions such as anterior cingulate cortex. Neither behavioral nor neural effects varied by infant age within the first year, suggesting that these regions may function early in development to support the reorienting of attention. Together, this furthers our mechanistic understanding of how the infant brain controls the allocation of attention.

Impaired sustained attention in groups at high risk for antisocial personality disorder: A contingent negative variation and standardized low-resolution tomographic analysis study

“…The inferior frontal gyrus is a part of the attention network for top-down attentional control (Cazzoli et al, 2021). The postcentral gyrus is activated while preparing for initiating movements (Hanakawa et al, 2003;Ellis et al, 2021). Thus, the source localization results support the interpretation of CNV in previous studies that the early, middle, and late CNV were related to top-down attention control and motor preparation, respectively.…”

Retinotopic organization of visual cortex in human infants

“…This was a stricter criterion than our other infant fMRI studies (Ellis, Skalaban, Yates, Bejjanki, Córdova, and Turk-Browne, 2020a,b;Ellis, Skalaban, Yates, and Turk-Browne, 2020c) because of the importance of eye position for retinotopy. Across all included phases, participants looked at the stimulus 91% of the time on average (range across participants=87-95%).…”

“…To perform retinotopic mapping, we used a new protocol that enables fMRI in awake and behaving infants (Ellis, Skalaban, Yates, Bejjanki, Córdova, and Turk-Browne, 2020a,b;Ellis, Skalaban, Yates, and Turk-Browne, 2020c). In individual infants from 5 to 23 months old, we sought to define ventral and dorsal V1, V2, and V3, dorsal V3A/B, and ventral V4.…”

Behavioral and neural measures of infant responsivity increase with maternal multisensory input in non‐irritable infants

“…Furthermore, we based our hypothesis on the relationships between FAS and attention. Emerging executive attention networks include the prefrontal cortex in infants (Ellis et al., 2020; Posner & Rothbart, 2007). Alpha oscillations gate cortical processes by transient inhibition of cortical and subcortical signals (Jensen & Mazaheri, 2010).…”