Unexpectedly, changes in right frontal EEG coherence were not associated with observed attentional control in this study. Hemispheric differences in attention have been commonly reported in the literature. Most notably, the right hemisphere is considered dominant for spatial orienting (Heilman & Van Den Abell, 1979), a perspective that has received much empirical support with adults (Corbetta & Shulman, 2002). However, unlike measures of spatial orienting, which concern the speed and accuracy of attention shifting in response to spatial cues, our measure of attention concerned only the accuracy of target identification; how quickly targets were found was not of interest, and any shifts of attention occurred in the absence of cues. For these reasons we did not expect coherence changes in the right hemisphere to be of greater significance to children’s attentional control than those in the left. However, that changes in right frontal EEG coherence made no significant contribution to children’s observed attentional control at all was unexpected.
