Dorsal attention network

The dorsal attention network (DAN), also known anatomically as the dorsal frontoparietal network (D-FPN), is a large-scale brain network of the human brain that is primarily composed of the intraparietal sulcus (IPS) and frontal eye fields (FEF). It is named and most known for its role in voluntary orienting of visuospatial attention.

As the IPS and FEF were noticed to be activated during many attention-demanding tasks, this network was sometimes referred to as the task-positive network to contrast it against the task-negative network, or default mode network. However, this dichotomy is now considered misleading, because the default mode network can be active in certain cognitive tasks.