sacrificing speed, suggesting a less impulsive performance style in adults. Performance in this study, however, was not covaried. The findings show that functional activation increases in fronto-striatal and temporo-parietal areas are also underlying relatively simple functions such as perceptive attention allocation [35]. A comparison between children between 8 and 12 years and adults during alerting and reorienting showed that children showed reduced activation in a priori defined regions of interest, i.e., in right fronto-cingulate and midbrain regions of alerting together with smaller alerting effects, and reduced activation in the right temporo-parietal junction during reorienting, concomitant with higher reorienting costs. Furthermore, findings remained in performance-matched subgroup analyses [46]. A developmental fMRI study of sustained attention in the continuous performance task in a large sample of 70 children and adults between 10 and 43 years showed progressively stronger recruitment in older subjects of brain regions associated with sustained attention in right-hemispheric lateral inferior frontal, superior temporal and inferior parietal cortices, despite comparable 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
