The neural and physiological substrates of real-world attention change across development.

Abstract

.The capacity to pay attention underpins all subsequent cognitive development. However, we understand little about how attention control is instantiated in the developing brain in complex, real-world settings. We recorded naturalistic attention patterns, together with autonomic arousal and brain activity, in 5- and 10-month-old infants during free play. We examined whether changes in autonomic arousal and brain activity associate with changes in moment-by-moment attentional engagement, and whether they anticipate attention changes, or follow on from them. Early in infancy, slow-varying fluctuations in autonomic arousal forward-predicted attentional behaviours. Later in infancy, fluctuations in fronto-central theta power associated with changes in infants’ attentiveness and predicted the length of infants’ attention durations; however, changes in cortical power followed, rather than preceded, infants’ attention shifts. Together, our results suggest that attention transitions from subcortical to cortical control; but that, even by later infancy, attention control is still reactive, driven by brain changes that take place after the onset of a new attention episode.