A large imaging study associated stimulant use with arousal- and reward-related network patterns while finding no significant changes in canonical attention networks. That result is narrower than saying stimulants cannot affect attention or that amphetamine alone caused every observed change.
Kay and colleagues analyzed pediatric ABCD data involving heterogeneous prescribed stimulants, including methylphenidate and lisdexamfetamine. Medication use on scanning day was observed rather than randomized.
A separate precision-imaging experiment in five healthy adults examined methylphenidate 40 mg. Its within-person comparison supported aspects of the network pattern, but it was a methylphenidate experiment, not a controlled amphetamine challenge. The drug-specific evidentiary boundary remains important.
The largest reported differences involved sensorimotor/action, auditory and salience-related systems. The study did not find significant connectivity differences in the specified dorsal or ventral attention and frontoparietal control networks.
This does not make every attention-demanding behavior equivalent to activity in those networks. A task can depend on alertness, motivation, motor responding and the value assigned to success. Different parcellations and network definitions can also change which signal is assigned to an attention system.
The pediatric cohort was not powered to isolate individual medication or ADHD-subtype effects. Precise dose timing and formulation information was limited, and the adult experiment involved very few participants. Associations with reported sleep cannot establish that stimulants replace adequate sleep.
The study proposes a useful account of network organization, rather than a universal mechanism established for all amphetamine formulations. Connectivity measures are not drug assays, direct measurements of dopamine or individual impairment tests. The safest interpretation preserves the population, medication class, analysis method and specific null comparison.
Read our analysis of a controlled methamphetamine resting-connectivity experiment.
Stimulant medications affect arousal and reward, not attention networks. doi:10.1016/j.cell.2025.11.039.