Executive Attention: A Case Study

Executive attention processes aid in supporting attentional orientating networks as they are viewed as more purified forms of self-regulation that is involved in modulating reactivity as the child matures (Rothbart & Rueda, 2005). It is the maturity of interdependent skills that is required for goal-directed activity that involves the use of mental representation of the desired behaviour to guide goal attainment and continuously modifying existing behaviour to direct them towards future goals. This process can be made clear by an example of a child using problem solving strategies to make a beaded necklace. The child may tell himself that he must hold the string while inserting the bead on the other end however the hole in the bead is apparently too small to fit onto
the string therefore he uses goal-directed activity to find a more suitable bead to fit the string (Phillips & Shonkoff, 2000). The development of executive attention is a complex process which involves three neural attention networks, all of which show different developmental trajectories and develop at different rates. The main goal of the alerting network is state regulation which involves maintaining an alert state.
The brain regions related to alert state regulation is the brains norepinephrine systems which start in the midbrain and meets the frontal and parietal areas. The second neural attention network is the orientating network which involves orientating to events in one’s sensory field and it is associated with both the inferior and superior parietal areas of the brain (Posner & Fan, 2008) along with activation in the frontal eye fields during sensory perception. Finally the third network, executive function aims to plan and detect errors as well as resolving conflict between different brain networks and the anterior cingulate is the brain region responsible for its functionality (Botvinick, Braver, Barch, Carter & Cohen, 2001). Activation of different brain networks however may change during different stages of development, these changes in focalization of brain activity may also appear during different types of cognitive tasks. As children develop, cognitive task performance is associated with smaller patterns of neural connections which progressively distribute activity from predominantly local to more global connections (Fair et al., 2009), this is evident during maturation of cognitive
performance. Parietal areas involved in orientating networks show significant connectivity to lateral and medial frontal areas that would only later in development be connected to executive attention. This means that executive functions can only emerge after children have the ability of orientating their behaviour to their social environment, anticipate events and also they must make use of symbolic representations to connect the present with past knowledge to achieve future goals. Therefore structures such as executive attention and effortful control may be present in early development but these networks do not exercise their full control until later. Orientating networks appear to be dominant in early development and executive control becomes evident later thus both of these control networks appear to have regulatory functions throughout the life-span.