ArticleThe Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience2019
Learning What Is Irrelevant or Relevant: Expectations Facilitate Distractor Inhibition and Target Facilitation through Distinct Neural Mechanisms.
Article in The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 62 papers.
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Who cites it
62 citing papers in PubMed.
- What Makes Joint Visual Search Efficient? A Distractor Suppression Account.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Article
- Not simply two sides of the same coin: Target enhancement and distractor suppression draw on independent neural mechanisms.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2026Article
- Predictive Distractor Processing Relies on Integrated Proactive and Reactive Attentional Mechanisms.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- Rapid inversion of singleton distractor representations underlies learned attentional suppression.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- On the rigidity of the preparation effect.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- How the brain predicts timing: distinct network hubs for predicting and evaluating auditory sensory events.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2026Article
- Broadband high-frequency activity initializes distractor suppression.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2025Article
- Alpha-Band Activity Tracks Reflexive Changes in the Breadth of the Zoom Lens of Attention.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Reward history alters priority map based on spatial relationship, but not absolute location.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Article
- Visual statistical learning requires attention.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Article
- Learning Modulates Early Encephalographic Responses to Distracting Stimuli: A Combined SSVEP and ERP Study.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Neural mechanisms of learned suppression uncovered by probing the hidden attentional priority map.eLife · 2025Article
- Differential neural mechanisms underlie cortical gating of visual spatial attention mediated by alpha-band oscillations.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Reward History and Statistical Learning Independently Impact Attention Search: An ERP Study.Brain sciences · 2024Article
- Conflicting Sensory Information Sharpens the Neural Representations of Early Selective Visuospatial Attention.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Article
- Reduced contextual uncertainty facilitates learning what to attend to and what to ignore.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2024Article
- Terms of debate: Consensus definitions to guide the scientific discourse on visual distraction.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2024Review
- Reliability of individual differences in distractor suppression driven by statistical learning.Behavior research methods · 2024Article
- Alpha-Band Lateralization and Microsaccades Elicited by Exogenous Cues Do Not Track Attentional Orienting.eNeuro · 2024Article
2 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
It is well known that attention can facilitate performance by top-down biasing processing of task-relevant information in advance. Recent findings from behavioral studies suggest that distractor inhibition is not under similar direct control but strongly dependent on expectations derived from previous experience. Yet, how expectations about distracting information influence distractor inhibition at the neural level remains unclear. The current study addressed this outstanding question in three experiments in which search displays with repeating distractor or target locations across trials allowed human observers (male and female) to learn which location to selectively suppress or boost. Behavioral findings demonstrated that both distractor and target location learning resulted in more efficient search, as indexed by faster response times. Crucially, distractor learning benefits were observed without target location foreknowledge, unaffected by the number of possible target locations, and could not be explained by priming alone. To determine how distractor location expectations facilitated performance, we applied a spatial encoding model to EEG data to reconstruct activity in neural populations tuned to distractor or target locations. Target location learning increased neural tuning to target locations in advance, indicative of preparatory biasing. This sensitivity increased after target presentation. By contrast, distractor expectations did not change preparatory spatial tuning. Instead, distractor expectations reduced distractor-specific processing, as reflected in the disappearance of the Pd event-related potential component, a neural marker of distractor inhibition, and decreased decoding accuracy. These findings suggest that the brain may no longer process expected distractors as distractors, once it has learned they can safely be ignored.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.