Attention recruits frontal cortex in human infants

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, these regions are thought to have a protracted maturation and so it is unclear whether they are recruited in infancy and, more generally, how infant attention is supported by the brain. We used event-related fMRI with 24 awake behaving infants 3-12 months old while they performed a child-friendly attentional cuing task. A target was presented to either the left or right of the infants fixation and eye-tracking 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 such as anterior cingulate cortex. 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 reorienting of attention. Together, this furthers our mechanistic understanding of how the infant brain controls the allocation of attention.