Fig. 2.

Model of the dual attention system (Corbetta and Shulman, 2002). (A) Information from an external stimulus can be processed along the following path. (1) Information from the retina about a stimulus (yellow sign) is first sent to the thalamus (through the LGN) (hatched black lines). (2) The thalamus dispatches the filtered information to cortex, as well as amygdala and striatum (these arrows are not shown here). (3) The occipital cortex carries this information to both the ventral (red lines) and dorsal attention (green lines) pathways. The ventral pathway will generate prepotent actions. The dorsal pathway will evaluate the information; activate rule representations that will engage networks to deal with the stimulus appropriately. The dorsal pathway can also influence prepotent responses through the modulation of the ventral pathway, here represented as the arrow from the DLPFC to the IFG/vPFC. (4) The amygdala and striatum receive, in addition to thalamic information, cortical information (arrows from thalamus to striatum and amygdala not represented here), and code the emotional/motivational value of the stimulus. This information is then shared with other brain areas, directly or through thalamic connections. Depending on the conditions of presentation of the stimuli (e.g., repeated pairing of stimuli), these subcortical structures may engage conditioning processes. DLPFC: dorsolateral prefrontal cortex; IFG: Inferior frontal gyrus; LGN: lateral geniculate nucleus; TPJ: temporoparietal junction; vPFC: ventral prefrontal cortex. (B) The upper panel schematizes the articulation between conditioning and attention in adolescents. The lower panel represents the simplified dual-attention system in adolescents. These functional patterns are likely to apply to specific conditions (e.g., in affectively charged contexts), which will need to be defined in future work. (For interpretation of the references to color in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of the article.)