The emergence and basis of endogenous attention in infancy and early childhood

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Publisher Summary

Attention is a familiar and ubiquitous psychological construct that is widely alluded to in various scientific, clinical, and colloquial domains. Attention also remains as one of the least well-understood cognitive functions. The processes that represent the construct of attention are often said to share a common theme of “selection.” However, the process of selection is complex and depends on a number of subsidiary processes, such as detection, localization, and probably some form of recognition. Advances in the cognitive neuroscience of attention have elucidated the neural pathways by which these processes occur and have lent support to the notion of the existence of many “varieties” of attention. Selection may be accomplished by different, seemingly independent neural substrates and thus, the nature, character, and function of attention during development can be determined by the interaction of different systems at different levels of maturity.

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