Abstract
Background: Prospective longitudinal studies are essential in characterizing cognitive trajectories, yet few of them have been reported on the development of attention processes in children. We aimed to explore attention development in normal children and children with attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms in a repeated measures design using the attention network test (ANT).Methods: The population sample included 2,835 children (49.6% girls) aged 7–11 years from 39 schools in Barcelona (Catalonia, Spain) who performed the ANT four times from January 2012 to March 2013. According to teacher ratings, 10.5% of the children presented ADHD symptoms. We performed multilevel mixed-effects linear regression models, adjusting for school and individual, to test the effects of age-related growth on the ANT networks: alerting, orienting and executive attention, and three measurements related to attentiveness: median of hit reaction time (HRT), hit reaction time standard error (HRT-SE) and variability.Results: We observed age-related growth in all the outcomes, except orienting. The curves were steeper at the younger groups, although for alertness the improvement was further at the oldest ages. Gender and ADHD symptoms interacted with age in executive attention, HRT and variability. Girls performed better in executive attention at young ages although boys reached females at around 10 years of age. For HRT, males showed faster HRT. However, girls had a more pronounced improvement and reached the levels of boys at age 11. Children with ADHD symptoms had significant differences in executive attention, HRT and variability compared to children without ADHD symptoms.Conclusions: We detected an ongoing development of some aspects of attention in primary school children, differentiating patterns by gender and ADHD symptoms. Our findings support the ANT for assessing attention processes in children in large epidemiological studies.
Highlights
Attention is a complex cognitive function involving different processes like selectively attending to specific stimuli, focusing for prolonged periods, or regulating and monitoring of actions (Anderson, 2002)
We aimed to study the trajectories of attention in a large longitudinal cohort of children using the attention network test (ANT) in a repeated measures design
According to the questionnaires rated by the teachers 10.5% of children presented ADHD symptoms, being the inattentive subtype the most prevalent across age groups (Table 2)
Summary
Attention is a complex cognitive function involving different processes like selectively attending to specific stimuli, focusing for prolonged periods, or regulating and monitoring of actions (Anderson, 2002). Alerting is the ability to produce and maintain optimal vigilance and performance during tasks (Petersen and Posner, 2012); the brain areas implicated are locus coeruleus, right frontal and parietal cortex. Orienting involves shifting attention to endogenous or exogenous cues (Corbetta et al, 1998; Posner et al, 2006); it involves parietal sites and frontal eye fields. Executive attention involves detecting and resolving conflict among responses, error detection and response inhibition (Bush et al, 2000); anterior cingulate cortex and prefrontal areas are involved in this network. Prospective longitudinal studies are essential in characterizing cognitive trajectories, yet few of them have been reported on the development of attention processes in children. We aimed to explore attention development in normal children and children with attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms in a repeated measures design using the attention network test (ANT)
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