| Working memory (WM) is highly related to psychometric intelligence. Neuroimaging studies have shown the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dIPFC) and prefrontal dopamine as central to WM and executive functioning. Despite the self-ordered pointing task's (SOPT) classification as a WM task, however, Diamond et al. (2004) found performance on this task to be insensitive to prefrontal dopamine levels. We hypothesized that this difference is related to the contrast between mental- (related to prefrontal dopamine circuits) and perceptual-attention (likely related to prefrontal acetylcholine circuits). Ninety-one children from grade 4 and 8, in gifted and mainstream academic streams, performed tasks requiring perceptual attention (SOPT), mental attention (n-back), measures of mental-attentional capacity, and executive functions (including inhibition and shifting). Gifted children outperformed their mainstream peers on all tasks, except the SOPT. This suggests that gifted children can be distinguished by high performance on complex tasks requiring primarily mental, but not perceptual, attention. |
