Educating executive attention.

R esearchers 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 conf lict 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 AttentionDeficit 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 2to 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 example, it has been shown that the executive attention network (6, 7) has a relatively large genetic component compared to more basic aspects of attention such as alerting and orienting (8). In addition, several studies have demonstrated that younger children, especially children below 4 years of age, have great difficulty performing tasks that involve solving some form of stimulus conf lict and thereby engaging the executive attention network (2, 3, 5, 9–11). However, in a recent study, Rueda et al. (3) found that performance on the executive component of the Attention Network Test (ANT, a test battery measuring three core attentional functions) does not improve significantly beyond age 7, indicating that children this age perform close to adult levels. On this basis, Rueda et al. (5) reason that because children between 4 and 6 years of age are still developing this ability, they constitute the