Visuospatial attention in children.

Attention is the process by which we select stimuli in our environment for perception and action. The ability to orient to salient visual stimuli and to parse the visual world begins to emerge in the first few months of life and continues to evolve through childhood. This review addresses how visuospatial attention develops, is deployed, and can be damaged in children. In particular, we discuss orienting, lateralized attention, and global vs local processing. Advances in our basic understanding of the cognitive neuroscience of visuospatial attention are beginning to inform pediatric neurology, but much work remains to be done.