ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
Attention recruits frontal cortex in human infants.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 39 papers.
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Who cites it
39 citing papers in PubMed.
- Dynamics of the attentional blink in preverbal infants.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Connecting the Dots: Associative Transfer and Inference at 6 Months of Age.Developmental psychobiology · 2026Article
- Infants have rich visual categories in ventrotemporal cortex at 2 months of age.Nature neuroscience · 2026Article
- Precision functional neuroimaging reveals individually specific auditory responses in infants.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2026Article
- No Unique Magnocellular Facilitation in Parafoveal Processing: A Combined EEG and Eye Tracking Study.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2026Article
- Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Awake Infants: Insights From More Than 750 Scanning Sessions.Infancy : the official journal of the International Society on Infant Studies · 2026Article
- Neural bases of sustained attention during naturalistic parent-infant interactions.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Spatial development of brain networks during the first six postnatal months.Communications biology · 2025Article
- A quarter century of research on infant contingency learning: Current and future directions.Infant behavior & development · 2025Review
- Temperament development in infancy: What we have learned about the origins of individual differences in the past 25 years.Infant behavior & development · 2025Review
- Precision Functional Neuroimaging Reveals Individually Specific Auditory Responses in Infants.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Fast and robust visual object recognition in young children.Science advances · 2025Article
- The FinnBrain multimodal neonatal template and atlas collection.Communications biology · 2025Article
- The impact of the early environment on oxytocin receptor epigenetics and potential therapeutic implications.Pediatric research · 2025Review
- Neural hyperscanning in caregiver-child dyads: A paradigm for studying the long-term effects of facilitated vs. disrupted attention on working memory and executive functioning in young children.Developmental review : DR · 2025Article
- Markers of consciousness in infants: Towards a 'cluster-based' approach.Acta paediatrica (Oslo, Norway : 1992) · 2025Review
- Functional reorganization of brain regions supporting artificial grammar learning across the first half year of life.PLoS biology · 2024Article
- A developmental model of audio-visual attention (MAVA) for bimodal language learning in infants and robots.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Helpless infants are learning a foundation model.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2024Review
- Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
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, it is unclear whether these regions are sufficiently mature in infancy to support attention and, more generally, how infant attention is supported by the brain. We used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in 24 sessions from 20 awake behaving infants 3 mo to 12 mo 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 offline gaze coding 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. 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 orienting of attention. Together, this furthers our mechanistic understanding of how the infant brain controls the allocation of attention.
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