task performance [32]. Furthermore, linear age-associated activation decreases were observed in earlier developing limbic and paralimbic medial temporal, posterior insular and posterior cingulate regions, suggesting stronger recruitment of bottom-up saliency detection processes in children and stronger recruitment of top-down attention control processes in adults [32]. Interestingly, when monetary reward was added to the attention trials, reward further potentiated the age-dependent activation increases in the sustained attention network in inferior frontal, temporal and cerebellar brain regions and elicited additional activation increases within top-down executive attention and motivation control areas such as dorsolateral (DLPFC) and vmPFC and dorsal striatum, presumably leading to more effective integration of motivation and cognition (Fig. 2c). With decreasing age, however, reward also amplified the earlier developing, more primitive posterior bottom-up visual spatial saliency detection regions that were negatively age-correlated [32]. The findings show that incentives have age-dependent effects on the development of attention networks, increasing activation in developing attention control and executive reward-processing regions, whilst decreasing paralimbic networks of visual–spatial attention to motivational saliency.
