Educating executive attention.

Researchers in the newly emerging field of developmental cognitive neuroscience seek to understand how postnatal brain development relates to changes in perceptual, cognitive, and social abilities in infants and children (1). One of the areas of cognitive development that has benefited most from a developmental cognitive neuroscience approach is attention. The ability to attend to individual objects, people, and spatial locations within our complex and varied sensory environment is fundamental to human cognition. One important aspect of attention, so-called executive attention, refers to our ability to regulate our responses, particularly in conflict situations where several responses are possible. This aspect of attention is thought to develop until early adulthood but seems to undergo a particularly rapid development between 2 and 7 years of age (2, 3), and problems with this function as well as other executive functions may underlie some of the difficulties observed in children with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) (4). In this issue of PNAS, Rueda et al. (5) present a study that elucidates several aspects of executive attention in young children. In their work, they have gathered measures of brain activity, cognition, and behavior in children aged 4 and 6 years. These measures include behavioral assessments of executive attention and intelligence, genotyping of a dopamine-related gene (DAT1), recording electrical activity at the scalp generated by neuronal function (ERPs), and parental questionnaires relating to the child's temperament. For each age group, half of the participants received a specific educational intervention designed to enhance executive attention. This training program, adapted to be child-friendly from a method originally used to prepare macaque monkeys for space travel, was given for 5 days over a 2- to 3-week period. Rueda et al. (5) build on previous work showing that executive attention has a specific developmental course and strong genetic associations. For …

发育认知神经科学这一新兴领域的研究人员试图了解出生后的大脑发育如何与婴儿和儿童的感知、认知及社交能力的变化相关（1）。从发育认知神经科学方法中获益最多的认知发展领域之一是注意力。在我们复杂多样的感官环境中关注单个物体、人物和空间位置的能力是人类认知的基础。注意力的一个重要方面，即所谓的执行性注意力，是指我们调节自身反应的能力，特别是在可能有多种反应的冲突情境中。这种注意力被认为会一直发展到成年早期，但在2到7岁之间似乎会经历特别快速的发展（2，3），并且这种功能以及其他执行功能的问题可能是注意缺陷/多动障碍（ADHD）儿童所表现出的一些困难的原因（4）。 在本期《美国国家科学院院刊》中，鲁埃达等人（5）发表了一项研究，阐明了幼儿执行性注意力的几个方面。在他们的研究中，他们收集了4岁和6岁儿童的大脑活动、认知和行为的测量数据。这些测量包括对执行性注意力和智力的行为评估、一种与多巴胺相关的基因（DAT1）的基因分型、记录由神经元功能在头皮上产生的电活动（事件相关电位，ERPs）以及与儿童气质相关的家长调查问卷。对于每个年龄组，一半的参与者接受了一种旨在提高执行性注意力的特定教育干预。这种训练方案是从一种最初用于训练猕猴进行太空旅行的方法改编而来，适合儿童，在2到3周的时间内进行了5天。 鲁埃达等人（5）在先前的研究基础上进行了拓展，先前的研究表明执行性注意力有特定的发展过程且与基因有很强的关联。对于……