The attentive brain: insights from developmental cognitive neuroscience

Amso, Dima; Scerif, Gaia

doi:10.1038/nrn4025

Cited by 290 publications

(249 citation statements)

References 195 publications

(238 reference statements)

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“…The findings of this study are consistent with the idea that increased attention and sustained activation in visual processing regions during the initial encoding of a stimulus contributes to the developmental changes in memory performance. Recent theoretical models propose a critical role for the ventral visual stream and category-preferential visual processing regions in the development of attention and memory (Amso & Scerif, 2015), and our results are broadly consistent with these ideas. Importantly, this model also proposes that not only enhanced feed-forward visual processing but also top–down attention contribute to enhanced attention and memory performance across development.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

“…Together, these findings suggest that age-related increases in memory of visual information might be related to increased recruitment of visual processing regions during encoding. Indeed, recent theoretical models have highlighted the important role of visual processing regions in increases in both attention and memory performance across development (Amso & Scerif, 2015). …”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Role of Visual Association Cortex in Associative Memory Formation across Development

Rosen

Sheridan

Sambrook

et al. 2018

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

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Associative learning underlies the formation of new episodic memories. Associative memory improves across development, and this age-related improvement is supported by the development of the hippocampus and pFC. Recent work, however, additionally suggests a role for visual association cortex in the formation of associative memories. This study investigated the role of category-preferential visual processing regions in associative memory across development using a paired associate learning task in a sample of 56 youths (age 6–19 years). Participants were asked to bind an emotional face with an object while undergoing fMRI scanning. Outside the scanner, participants completed a memory test. We first investigated age-related changes in neural recruitment and found linear age-related increases in activation in lateral occipital cortex and fusiform gyrus, which are involved in visual processing of objects and faces, respectively. Furthermore, greater activation in these visual processing regions was associated with better subsequent memory for pairs over and above the effect of age and of hippocampal and pFC activation on performance. Recruitment of these visual processing regions mediated the association between age and memory performance, over and above the effects of hippocampal activation. Taken together, these findings extend the existing literature to suggest that greater recruitment of category-preferential visual processing regions during encoding of associative memories is a neural mechanism explaining improved memory across development.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Role of Visual Association Cortex in Associative Memory Formation across Development

Rosen

Sheridan

Sambrook

et al. 2018

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

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“…The full extent to which dependence of a multisensory process on one form of top-down control indeed impacts dependenceon other types of control is further complicated by the likely contingence of top-down expectations and object-matching processes on goalbased control, especially during development (e.g. Astle and Scerif 2011;Thillay et al 2015;Amso and Scerif 2015). Shedding more light onto the interdependencies within multisensory processes as well as between 23 respective forms of top-down control is a critical next step to advance our understanding of sensory processing in real-world environments.…”

Section: Future Directionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The COGs (context, object, and goals) in multisensory processing

et al. 2016

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Our understanding of how perception operates in real-world environments has been substantially advanced by studying both multisensoryprocesses and "top-down" control processes influencing sensory processing via activity from higher-order brain areas, such as attention, memory, and expectations. As the two topicshave been traditionally studied separately, the mechanisms orchestrating real-world multisensory processingremain unclear.Past work has revealed that the observer's goals gate the influence of many multisensory processes on brain and behavioural responses, whereas some other multisensory processes mightoccur independently of these goals. Consequently, other forms of top-down control beyond goaldependence are necessaryto explain the full range of multisensory effects currently reported at the brain and the cognitive level. These forms of control includesensitivity to stimulus context as well as the detection of matches(or lack thereof) between a multisensory stimulus and categorical attributes of naturalistic objects (e.g. tools, animals). In this review we discuss and integrate the existing findings that demonstrate the importance of such goal-, object-and context-based top-down control over multisensory processing. We then put forward a few principles emerging from this literature review with respect to the mechanisms underlying multisensory processing, and discuss their possible broader implications. Attention, multisensory, control, object, audiovisual, brain mapping 3 Research from the past 30 years has demonstrated a whole range of behavioural benefits engendered by integrating information across the senses (multisensory integration, MSI), including faster motor responses and facilitated object recognition in noisy environments (e.g. Stein 2012). In a separate and independent manner, studies employing unisensory stimuli have been critically advancing our understanding of the nature and the importance of top-down mechanisms that control information processing. Thetopdown nature of these mechanisms lies in that they shape perceptual processing of new inputs by activating information stored in higher-order brain areas (e.g. Summerfield and Egner 2009). Key words:Studies of top-down control have traditionally focused on attentional (i.e. goaldependent)mechanisms, which promote the processing of stimulior objects in the environment that areimportant tothe current behavioural goals of the observer (e.g.Desimone and Duncan 1995). These mechanisms enhance the processing of stimuli appearing in task-relevant spatial locations and/or moments in time. These mechanisms likewise facilitate the processingof those stimuli whose attributes (e.g. colour red), feature dimensions (e.g. shape) or identity (e.g. a particular face) match the observer's goals.Simultaneously, it has been increasingly recognised in the literature that information processing issensitive to other types oftop-down processes, principally those gauged by thememory of past stimulation and one's expectations (see Figure 1A for a summar...

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“…Generally, it may be more valid to instead specify the conditions under which a given neural event may be elicited or not elicited, rather than to classify it into semi-binary categories. Furthermore, our results open an exciting possibility that automaticity of brain/cognitive processes and its dependence on experience (Astle and Scerif, 2011;Amso and Scerif, 2015;Murray et al, 2015b) can perhaps be more accurately understood by testing them in settings that resemble more naturalistic environments (e.g., Matusz et al, 2015b). In such environments, there is a variety of dimensions along which the stimuli that are present at any point time differ.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

The context-contingent nature of cross-modal activations of the visual cortex

2016

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Real-world environments are nearly always multisensory in nature. Processing in such situations confers perceptual advantages, but its automaticity remains poorly understood. Automaticity has been invoked to explain the activation of visual cortices by laterally-presented sounds. This has been observed even when the sounds were task-irrelevant and spatially uninformative about subsequenttargets. An auditory-evoked contralateral occipital positivity (ACOP) at ~250ms post-sound onset has been postulated as the event-related potential (ERP) correlate of this cross-modal effect. However, the spatial dimension of the stimuli was nevertheless relevant in all prior studies where the ACOP was observed. By manipulating the implicit predictability of the location of lateralised sounds in a passive auditory paradigm, we tested the automaticity of cross-modal activations of visual cortices.128-channel ERP data from healthy participants were analysed within an electrical neuroimaging framework. The timing, topography, and localisation resembled previous characterisations of the ACOP. However, the cross-modal activations of visual cortices by sounds were critically dependent on whether the sound location was (un)predictable. Our results are the first direct evidence that this particular cross-modal process is not (fully) automatic; instead, it is context-contingent. More generally, the present findings provide novel insights into the importance of context-related factors in controlling information processing across the senses, and call for a revision of current models of automaticity in cognitive sciences.

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The attentive brain: insights from developmental cognitive neuroscience

Cited by 290 publications

References 195 publications

The Role of Visual Association Cortex in Associative Memory Formation across Development

The Role of Visual Association Cortex in Associative Memory Formation across Development

The COGs (context, object, and goals) in multisensory processing

The context-contingent nature of cross-modal activations of the visual cortex

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