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402 EDUCATIONAL INTERVENTIONScould be an important part of education preventing mental illnesses related todeficits of self-regulation.Attentional NetworksDuring the past several years we have examined the development of brain networksinvolved in three attentional functions: obtaining and maintaining the alertstate, orienting to sensory stimuli, and regulating responses, thoughts, and feelings.These networks, common to all people, involve different brain areas (Fan,McCandliss, Fossella, Flombaum, & Posner, 2005) and exhibit different timecourses of development during childhood (Rueda, Fan, McCandliss, Halparin,Gruber, et al., 2004a).The three networks are illustrated in table 18-1, showing the brain areas thatserve as the sources of the attentional effects and the neuromodulators that affecttheir functioning. Although the neuroanatomy of attention is well defined, givenits regulatory function, the sites at which attention operates are numerous. In fact,many studies have suggested that the regulatory effects of attention are commonto most areas of the brain. Attention has been shown to modulate the function ofsensory systems; for example, orienting to visual stimuli activates visual areas ofthe occipital cortex, whereas orienting to auditory stimuli activates primary andsecondary auditory areas. However, this regulatory function applies just as wellto brain systems involved in the processing of language, memorization of information,and generation of emotions (Posner & Raichle, 1994).Measuring Individual Differences on AttentionIn the past years, we have developed the Attention Network Test (ANT) to examineindividual differences in the efficiency of the brain networks of alerting, orienting,and executive attention discussed above (Fan, McCandliss, Sommer, Raz,& Posner, 2002; Rueda, Fan, et al., 2004a). The ANT uses differences in reactiontime (RT) between conditions to measure the efficiency of each network. Eachtrial begins with a cue (or a blank interval, in the no-cue condition) that informsthe participant that a target will be occurring soon, where it will occur, or both.The target always occurs either above or below fixation, and it consists of a centralarrow, surrounded by flanking arrows that can either point in the same direction(congruent) or in the opposite direction (incongruent). Subtracting RTs forcongruent from incongruent target trials provides a measure of conflict resolutionand assesses the efficiency of the executive attention network. SubtractingRTs obtained in the double-cue condition from RT in the no-cue condition givesa measure of alerting due to the presence of a warning signal. Subtracting RTs to