In traditional accounts, fluctuations in sustained and focused attention and associated attentional lapses during task performance are regarded as the result of failures of top-down and effortful higher order processes. The current paper reviews an alternative hypothesis: that spontaneous patterns of very low frequency (<0.1 Hz) coherence within a specific brain network ('default-mode network')...

Attentional processing has been associated with the dorsal attention, default mode, and frontoparietal control networks. The dorsal attention network is involved in externally focused attention whereas the default mode network is involved in internally directed attention. The frontoparietal control network has been proposed to mediate the transition between external and internal attention by co...