Funded Grants

Effects of attention disorders on developing cognition: Mechanisms and plasticity

A fundamental question about human cognition is the extent to which it is predetermined to take its adult shape, or is instead malleable and dependent on learning from the environment. This question naturally brings researchers to investigate the early development of cognitive functions, and theoretical positions have coalesced around distinct alternatives. Nativists propose that infants come to the world equipped with a sophisticated armament of skills and conceptual knowledge. Claims of innate specification of cognitive domains have been bolstered by dissociations of function in individuals with developmental disorders, especially those associated with a known genetic aetiology. Constructivist accounts instead see environmental input as instrumental and question the notion of developmental disorders as islets of intact and impaired ability.

A way to turn impasse into dialogue is to ask how domain-specific knowledge emerges through domaingeneral processes such as attentional control: active selection of information in the environment gates processing into short-term and long-term memory. Executive processes also provide the mental workspace necessary to select or ignore, update and maintain information online and therefore constrain domainspecific learning both concurrently and longitudinally. Attention and executive deficits could lead to cascading effects across many domains of cognition, with uneven cognitive profiles resulting from interactions between attentional biases and characteristics of the to-be-learned information. In this context, studying individuals with disorders of attention and executive control from early childhood, rather than just in adulthood, has the potential to assess disorders' role in substantiating the innate specification and modular structure of cognition.

Work in my laboratory has investigated disorder-specific profiles of early attention difficulties in developmental disorders that are either genetically or functionally defined, as well as their trajectories and outcomes on behaviour and cognition. Understanding how distinct attention disorders affect cognitive processes has required a prospective longitudinal approach and experimental paradigms that can tap attention and executive control in young and less able children. In a complementary fashion, we study optimal interactions of attention and executive control with memory and learning over typical development, from early childhood into adulthood.

The data emerging from these studies at the interface between attention disorders and their cascading effects on cognition have generated novel questions. How do deficits influence interactions with naturalistic environments? Are attention deficits predetermined to follow their course, or instead malleable? I propose to study how attention and executive control mediate outcomes across cognitive domains and in everyday situations such as complex classroom environments. Importantly, in order to test the plasticity of attention difficulties and their effects on other cognitive processes, I propose to contrast controlled training regimes that modify domain-general mechanisms like attention (training children in "how to learn") with domainspecific interventions (training them on "what to learn"). These two complementary approaches will target core questions about mechanisms fostering the developing mind, because they will test the efficacy and specificity of attention training effects across cognitive domains, and the extent to which attention deficits associated with an identified genetic aetiology or high familial risk are amenable to environmental influences.