DEVELOPMENTAL SCIENCE REVIEW Attention trajectories, mechanisms and outcomes: at the interface between developing cognition and environment Gaia Scerif Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, UK Abstract Attentional processes play a crucial role in prioritizing information for further processing and they therefore sit at the interface between internal goals and the challenges presented by the environment. Howdoes attentional control interact with the changing constraints imposed by the developing cognitive system? Emerging work in this area has employed a range of complementary techniques, from increasingly refined neurocognitive measures in typically developing individuals, to the investigation of risk or protective factors influencing attention trajectories in developmental disorders. A growing corpus of data suggests that, while attentional biases for specific input characteristics (e.g. suddenly appearing stimuli, emotional expressions) are in place from infancy, it is the interplay between these predispositions, genetic and environmental factors that drives attention development over time. With the advent of multidisciplinary approaches to the developmental cognitive neuroscience of attention, unravelling these complex dynamics from infancy and their outcome on learning is increasingly within reach. Introduction Dealing with a complex environment requires prioritiz- ing certain stimuli over others according to one’s goals. These attentional biases gate information for further processing at multiple levels of analysis, from the per- ception of incoming stimuli, to memory encoding, to the control of actions. They are implemented by an extended frontoparietal network, whose coordinated activity influences competition amongst stimuli or responses represented in lower cortical or subcortical areas (Posner & Rothbart, 2007). To developmental cognitive neuro- scientists, therefore, understanding what drives changes in attentional processes is critical for at least two reasons: first, on a moment-by-moment basis, it can reveal how slowly developing neurocognitive control mechanisms interact with salient perceptual characteristics of the sensory world; second, it provides insights into the cas- cading effects of attentional differences on action selec- tion and learning over time. Three overarching themes shape new perspectives on the developmental science of attention: the interplay between stimulus-driven and endogenous factors over time; the extent to which developmental disorders inform mechanisms of typical attention development; and interactions between atten- tion, memory and learning. This is by design a selective overview of the latest literature, dotted by references to fuller expositions of specific points. I focus primarily on attentional development in terms of its influence on visual processing, and less as the executive control of action (but see Crone, 2009, for a related review, and Hanania & Smith, 2010, for overlap across these pro- cesses). For each theme, I first describe findings from childhood to adulthood, to then highlight insights emerging from the study of attention in infants and younger children. Trajectories of attention: the interplay between the attentive observer and the visual world Models of attention construe attention as an ensemble of highly related but distinguishable processes (e.g. alerting, orienting, selective, sustained and executive attention) that are influenced by, on the one hand, endogenous influences driven by internal representations of task goals, and, on the other, by exogenous influences repre- senting the extent to which attention is captured by events in the environment (Corbetta & Shulman, 2002). How do these factors interact over developmental time? Developmental trajectories of attentional processes: childhood and beyond Iarocci, Enns, Randolph and Burack (2009) investigated the coordination of endogenous and exogenous influ- ences by asking participants aged 5 to 81 years of age to detect the appearance of a peripheral target. These were Address for correspondence: Gaia Scerif, Attention, Brain and Cognitive Development Group, Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3UD, UK; e-mail: gaia.scerif@psy.ox.ac.uk Ó 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. Developmental Science 13:6 (2010), pp 805–812 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2010.01013.x