Interactions between attention-grabbing brain networks weak in ADHD, study says
The degree of weakness was correlated to the severity of the children's inattention symptoms, the researchers found. The study will be published online Dec. 15 in Biological Psychiatry . The researchers focused on the salience network , which is a set of brain regions that work together through well-synchronized neural activity to help decide where one's attention should be directed. In most children, this network can assess the importance of internal and external events, and then regulate other thoughts to focus attention in the right place. "A lot of things may be happening in one's environment , but only some grab our attention," said Vinod Menon, PhD, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and the study's senior author. "The salience network helps us stop daydreaming or thinking about something that happened yesterday so we can focus on the task at hand. We found that this network's ability to regulate interactions with other b...