A Review of Childhood Developmental Changes in Attention as Indexed in the Electrical Activity of the Brain

Abstract

This review aims to present age-related changes in the neuroelectric responses of typically developing children (TDC) who are presumed to meet developmental stages appropriately. The review is based on findings from the frequently used neuropsychological tasks of active attention, where attention is deliberately focused versus passive attention where attention is drawn to a stimulus, facilitatory attention, which enhances the processing of a stimulus versus inhibitory attention, which suppresses the processing of a stimulus. The review discusses the early and late stages of attentional selectivity that correspond to early and late information processing. Age-related changes in early attentional selectivity were quantitatively represented in latencies of the event-related potential (ERP) components. Age-related changes in late attentional selectivity are also qualitatively represented by structural and functional reorganization of attentional processing and the brain areas involved. The purely bottom-up or top-down processing is challenged with age-related findings on difficult tasks that ensure a high cognitive load. TDC findings on brain oscillatory activity are enriched by findings from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The transition from the low to fast oscillations in TDC and ADHD confirmed the maturational lag hypothesis. The deviant topographical localization of the oscillations confirmed the maturational deviance model. The gamma-based match and utilization model integrates all levels of attentional processing. According to these findings and theoretical formulations, brain oscillations can potentially display the human brain’s wholistic–integrative functions.