On the Origins and Development of Attention Networks

Dear Colleagues,

Attention is a central cognitive function that is key to many other cognitive skills (e.g., perception, learning, reasoning, memory, consciousness, self-regulation). Given this central role in cognition, attention is involved in many aspects of life, such as academic achievement, socio-emotional adjustment (Rueda, Checa, and Rothbart, 2010), physical and emotional health, and wealth in the adult life (Moffit et al., 2011).

In recent decades, Posner and colleagues developed a network theory of attention greatly backed by the analysis of brain-damaged patients and neuroimaging studies in the field of Cognitive Neuroscience (Posner and Petersen, 1990; Petersen and Posner, 2012). This model describes attention as the combined function of brain systems supporting alerting (i.e., reaching and maintaining an optimal activation level), orienting (i.e., selecting a primary source of stimulation for conscious processing among the many reaching our senses), and executive control (i.e., tuning responses to goals and instructions, which often requires inhibiting automatic but non-appropriate courses of actions). Alerting is associated with the function of the locus coeruleus, the brainstem source of norepinephrine, in connection with areas of the frontal and parietal cortices that become activated by warning cues or during sustained attention tasks (Aston-Jones and Cohen, 2005). The orienting network involves differentiated ventral and dorsal parieto-frontal pathways, respectively, for bottom-up (stimulus-driven) and top-down (goal-directed) selection of the sensory input (Corbetta, Patel, and Shulman, 2008). Finally, executive attention is supported by a frontal cingulo-opercular circuit involved in detecting targets and maintaining the task set, in coordination with a fronto-parietal circuit involved in adjusting responses to targets (Dosenbach et al., 2008).

Compelling evidence suggest that intelligence largely relies on the attention-based capacity to regulate mental activity and behavior according to goals and intentions, allowing for the flexible adaptation to changing contextual conditions (see Rueda, 2018). For instance, individual differences in fluid intelligence are associated with a more proactive, strategic deployment of attention and more efficient network function in both children (Rico-Picó et al., 2021) and adults (Burgess and Braver, 2010; Hilger et al., 2017).

The brain network framework of the Posner’s attention model confers a number of advantages, besides the understanding of neural mechanisms underpinning attention functions. Among other interesting questions such as the analysis of psychopathology and the impact of interventions to palliate attentional difficulties, the attention network theory provides a model for studying changes in the functioning and architecture of the circuitry that occur in connection with individual and group differences in efficacy of attention, as those occurring with age or during evolution. An increasing number of studies have examined changes in attentive behavior and underlying neural mechanisms that happen during childhood development (Rueda, 2014). This is achieved by studies comparing individuals of different ages (cross-sectional studies) or following the development of a particular cohort in time (longitudinal studies). Analyzing changes during phylogeny involves comparisons across species sharing more or less recent common ancestors (e.g., Patel et al., 2015; Fjell et al., 2015), or analyzing the possible brain behavior changes inferred by the study of fossils and cultural material of extinct species (i.e., cognitive archeology; e.g., Bruner et al., 2018). 

The current Special Issue aims at expanding the understanding of both the development and evolution of attention networks. Commonalities between changing processes in ontogeny and phylogeny have been long observed, and recent evidence also suggests the existence of similarities between maturational mechanisms of change during evolution and development (Hill et al., 2010; Fjell et al., 2015). Therefore, an increased comprehension of both processes will nourish each other and contribute to our understanding of the origins and emergence of human intelligent behavior.

Consequently, for the current Special Issue, we are interested in receiving the following types of papers:

• Papers reviewing existing and/or presenting new research expanding on the development of attention functions of alerting, selection, and control along the lifespan (ontogenetic development);
• Papers reviewing existing and/or presenting new research expanding on the understanding of changes in brain and/or behavior processes related to attention occurring during evolution;
• Papers presenting grounded theories of evolution and/or development of attention networks;
• Papers that connect evolution and/or development intelligence with the evolution and/or development attention networks.

Prof. Dr. M. Rosario Rueda
Prof. Dr. Raymond M. Klein
Guest Editors

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