and preschoolers (Dawson and Ashman, 2000; Gunnar and Donzella, 2002; Hane and Fox, 2006). In addition to parent and teacher reports that children who have experienced ELS demonstrate attention and self-regulation problems (Kreppner et al., 2001; Provence and Lipton, 1962; Roy et al., 2004; Shields et al., 1994; Stevens et al., 2008), both children in foster care and those adopted from institutions demonstrate difficulties on neuropsychological tasks that rely on prefrontal attention regulatory circuits (Bruce, McDermott et al., 2009; Colvert et al., 2008; Pears and Fisher, 2005). A recent study found that post-institutionalized children performed more poorly than non-institutionalized children on a visual attention task related to locating a target from an array of stimuli (Pollak et al., in press). Similarly, isolate-reared monkeys were found to display deficits on executive tasks which correlated with reduced white matter tracts in the PFC and ACC (Sanchez et al., 1998). Thus, it is likely that ELS and the processes that support recovery both influence development of PFC-limbic pathways associated with frontal EEG asymmetry and emerging executive attention capacities.
