Executive attention (EA), one of Posner's three components of attention, involves the central processing that occurs when handling two tasks simultaneously (Posner & Boies, 1971; Posner & Peterson, 1990). EA resolves conflict among thoughts, feelings, and responses, and it relates to childhood skills such as bilingual communication, reading comprehension, self-regulation, and the control of mind-wandering (McVay & Kane, 2012; Rueda, Posner, & Rothbart, 2005; Yang, Yang, & Lust, 2011). Despite its importance, relatively little research has explored individual differences in EA among typically-developing children. Following, we explore the roots of these differences by describing the neural bases of EA, ways in which EA is measured, and the
