Neither Enhanced Nor Lost: The Unique Role of Attention in Children's Neural Representations

• Type of Material: Article
• Authors: Yaelan Jung, Emory University; Tess Allegra Forest, University of Toronto; Dirk B. Walther, University of Toronto; Amy S. Finn, University of Toronto
• Language: English
• Date: 2023-05-24
• Publisher: Society for Neuroscience
• Publication Version: Final Published Version
• Copyright Statement: © 2023 the authors
• Final Published Version (URL): https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0159-23.2023
• Title of Journal or Parent Work: The Journal of Neuroscience
• Volume: 43
• Issue: 21
• Start Page: 3849
• End Page: 3859
• Grant/Funding Information: This work was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight Program Grant 435171493 (to A.S.F.) and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Grant RGPIN-2016-05 (to A.S.F.) and Discovery Grant RGPIN-2020-04097 (to D.B.W.).
• Keywords: fMRI; development; cognitive neuroscience; attention
• Research Categories: Biology, Neuroscience; Psychology, Cognitive

Abstract

A defining feature of children's cognition is the especially slow development of their attention. Despite a rich behavioral literature characterizing the development of attention, little is known about how developing attentional abilities modulate neural representations in children. This information is critical to understanding how attentional development shapes the way children process information. One possibility is that attention might be less likely to shape neural representations in children as compared with adults. In particular, representations of attended items may be less likely to be enhanced relative to unattended items. To investigate this possibility, we measured brain activity using fMRI while children (seven to nine years; male and female) and adults (21–31 years; male and female) performed a one-back task in which they were directed to attend to either motion direction or an object in a display where both were present. We used multivoxel pattern analysis to compare decoding accuracy of attended and unattended information. Consistent with attentional enhancement, we found higher decoding accuracy for task-relevant information (i.e., objects in the object-attended condition) than for task-irrelevant information (i.e., motion in the object-attended condition) in adults' visual cortices. However, in children's visual cortices, both task-relevant and task-irrelevant information were decoded equally well. What is more, whole-brain analysis showed that the children represented task-irrelevant information more than adults in multiple regions across the brain, including the prefrontal cortex. These findings show that (1) attention does not modulate neural representations in the child visual cortex, and (2) developing brains can, and do, represent more information than mature brains.