ArticleDevelopmental cognitive neuroscience2026
Reduced information sharing within the orienting network predicts intelligence in late childhood.
Article in Developmental cognitive neuroscience, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Understanding how intelligence emerges from the developing brain remains a central question in developmental cognitive neuroscience. While prior work has linked intelligence to regional activation and structural maturation, less is known about how the efficiency of distributed functional networks contributes to cognitive ability during childhood. We examined 38 children aged 11-14 years as they performed the Attention Network Test (ANT) while undergoing electroencephalography (EEG). Attentional network engagement was characterised using cue-locked event-related potentials (ERPs), frontal midline theta power during conflict processing, and weighted Symbolic Mutual Information (wSMI) to quantify nonlinear information sharing across distributed networks. Canonical electrophysiological signatures of alerting, orienting, and conflict processing were robustly replicated. However, only distributed nonlinear connectivity within the orienting network predicted Full-Scale IQ (FS-IQ). Specifically, reduced information sharing during spatial orienting was associated with higher intelligence scores, whereas local ERP and theta measures showed no reliable associations. These findings suggest that intelligence in late childhood is linked not to greater neural activation, but to more efficient network-level coordination within task-relevant attentional systems. Our results extend the neural efficiency hypothesis into a developmental framework and highlight nonlinear connectivity as a sensitive marker of cognitive maturation.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.