Test-retest Reliability of the Attention Network Test from the
Perspective of Intrinsic Network Organization
Abstract
The attention network test (ANT), developed based on the triple-network
taxonomy by Posner and colleagues, has been widely used to examine the
efficacy of alerting, orienting, and executive control in clinical and
developmental neuroscience studies. Recent research suggests the
imperfect reliability of the behavioral ANT and its variants. However,
the classical ANT fMRI task’s test-retest reliability has received
little attention. Moreover, it remains ambiguous whether the
attention-related intrinsic network components, especially the dorsal
attention, ventral attention, and frontoparietal network, manifest
acceptable reliability. The present study approaches these issues by
utilizing an openly available ANT fMRI dataset for participants with
Parkinson’s disease and healthy elderly. The reproducibility of
group-level activations across sessions and participant groups and the
test-retest reliability at the individual level were examined at the
voxel, region, and network levels. The intrinsic network was defined
using the Yeo-Schaefer atlas. Our results reveal three critical facets:
(1) The overlapping of the group-level contrast map between sessions and
between participant groups was unsatisfactory; (2) The reliability of
alerting, orienting, and executive, defined as contrast between
conditions, was worse than estimates of specific conditions. (3) Dorsal
attention, ventral attention, visual, and somatomotor networks showed
acceptable reliability for the congruent and incongruent conditions. Our
results suggest that specific condition estimates might be used instead
of the contrast map for individual or group-difference studies.