Attentional control

Attentional control refers to an individual's capacity to choose what they pay attention to and what they ignore. It is also known as endogenous attention or executive attention. In lay terms, attentional control can be described as an individual's ability to concentrate. Primarily mediated by the frontal areas of the brain including the anterior cingulate cortex, attentional control is thought to be closely related to other executive functions such as working memory.

Posner & Peterson explain how sources of attention in our brain create a system, which can be categorized into 3 networks: alertness (maintaining awareness), orientation (information from sensory input), and executive control (resolving conflict). Experimental designs that study these 3 networks range from participants of adults, children, monkeys, and those with and without abnormalities of attention. Some research designs include the Stroop task and flanker task (developed by Eriksen and Eriksen) both of which study executive control, with analysis techniques including event-related functional magnetic resonance image (fMRI). While some research designs focus specifically on one aspect of attention (such as executive control), others experiments view several areas, which examine interactions between the alerting, orienting, and executive control networks. Recently, experimenters have been studying attention with The Attention Network Test (ANT), designed by Fan and Posner, which requires participants to quickly respond to cues given on a computer screen, while having their attention fixated on a center target. The goal of some of this research is to create a behavioral task that incorporates all three networks to examine their relationships. The main goal is to obtain efficiency measures of the three networks, and have the design be simple enough to obtain data from children, patients, and animals.

Early researchers studying the development of the frontal cortex thought that it was functionally silent during the first year of life. Similarly, early research suggested that infants aged one year or younger are completely passive in the allocation of their attention, and have no capacity to choose what they pay attention to and what they ignore. This is shown, for example, in the phenomenon of 'sticky fixation', whereby infants are incapable of disengaging their attention from a particularly salient target. Other research has suggested, however, that even very young infants do have some capacity to exercise control over their allocation of attention, albeit in a much more limited sense.

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