Attention Fan & Posner (2004) - Attention Systems

Attention System

• The attention system involves specialist networks that maintain alertness, orient resources to relevant sensory events, and control behaviour.
• The attention system can be fractionated into subsystems with specific cognitive functions and anatomical substrates.

Subsystems of Attention

• Alerting: involved in preparatory changes in the individual's ability to receive, evaluate, and respond to an upcoming stimulus.
• Orienting: involved in physically distinguishing between exogenous and endogenous cues, temporally distinguishing between enhancement and inhibition of stimuli at cued locations, and functionally distinguishing between valid and invalid cues.
• Executive Control (Conflict): involved in resolving conflicts between different stimuli or responses.

Brain Regions Associated with Attention

• Frontal-Eye Fields (FEF): associated with endogenous cues.
• Intraparietal Sulcus: associated with endogenous cues.
• Superior Parietal Lobe: associated with endogenous cues.
• Ventral Prefrontal Cortex: associated with exogenous cues.
• Temporal Parietal Junction: associated with exogenous cues.

Testing Attention

• Theoretical models and empirical studies describe and explain the brain mechanisms associated with prioritizing relevant over irrelevant information.
• The Attention Network Test (Fan et al., 2002) is a task that manipulates orienting, alerting, and executive control (congruent vs. incongruent).
• The timed cancellation task is used to measure attention, including the number of balloons crossed on the left and right and the time to completion.