Altered Whole-Brain Resting-State Functional Connectivity Patterns Associated With Pediatric Anxiety and Involuntary Attention Capture

Abstract

Pediatric anxiety disorders are linked to dysfunction in multiple functional brain networks, as well as alterations in the allocation of spatial attention processing. We used network level analyses to characterize resting-state functional connectivity alterations associated with (1) symptoms of anxiety and (2) alterations in stimulus-driven attention associated with pediatric anxiety disorders. We hypothesized that anxiety was related to altered connectivity of the fronto-parietal, default mode, cingulo-opercular, and ventral attention networks; and that anxiety-related connectivity alterations that include the ventral attention network would simultaneously be related to deviations in stimulus-driven attention.