ArticleThe Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience2021
Strategic Distractor Suppression Improves Selective Control in Human Vision.
Article in The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 25 papers.
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Who cites it
25 citing papers in PubMed, 56 citations in OpenAlex.
- The alpha rhythm: from physiology to behavior.Physiological reviews · 2026Review
- Frequency-specific attentional mechanisms phasically modulate the influence of distractors on task performance.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Higher baseline alpha power is associated with faster responses in visual search.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Cueing distractors is effective when the incentive to suppress is high.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2025Article
- Guided visual search is associated with target boosting and distractor suppression in early visual cortex.Communications biology · 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
- Is covert attention necessary for programming accurate saccades? Evidence from saccade-locked event-related potentials.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2025Article
- The Effect of Congruent versus Incongruent Distractor Positioning on Electrophysiological Signals during Perceptual Decision-Making.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Article
- Terms of debate: Consensus definitions to guide the scientific discourse on visual distraction.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2024Review
- Separate Cue- and Alpha-Related Mechanisms for Distractor Suppression.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Article
- Distractor inhibition by alpha oscillations is controlled by an indirect mechanism governed by goal-relevant information.Communications psychology · 2024Review
- Prospective Distractor Information Reduces Reward-Related Attentional Capture.Journal of cognition · 2024Article
- Testing the impact of hatha yoga on task switching: a randomized controlled trial.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2024Article
- Suppressive Control of Incentive Salience in Real-World Human Vision.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2023Article
- Neural correlates of value-driven spatial orienting.Psychophysiology · 2023Article
- Neurophysiological Measures of Proactive and Reactive Control in Negative Template Use.Journal of cognitive neuroscience · 2023Article
- The causal mechanisms underlying analogical reasoning performance improvement by executive attention intervention.Human brain mapping · 2023Article
- No evidence for spatial suppression due to across-trial distractor learning in visual search.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2023Article
- Time Courses of Attended and Ignored Object Representations.Journal of cognitive neuroscience · 2023Article
- Negative and positive templates: Two forms of cued attentional control.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2023Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Our visual environment is complicated, and our cognitive capacity is limited. As a result, we must strategically ignore some stimuli to prioritize others. Common sense suggests that foreknowledge of distractor characteristics, like location or color, might help us ignore these objects. But empirical studies have provided mixed evidence, often showing that knowing about a distractor before it appears counterintuitively leads to its attentional selection. What has looked like strategic distractor suppression in the past is now commonly explained as a product of prior experience and implicit statistical learning, and the long-standing notion the distractor suppression is reflected in α band oscillatory brain activity has been challenged by results appearing to link α to target resolution. Can we strategically, proactively suppress distractors? And, if so, does this involve α? Here, we use the concurrent recording of human EEG and eye movements in optimized experimental designs to identify behavior and brain activity associated with proactive distractor suppression. Results from three experiments show that knowing about distractors before they appear causes a reduction in electrophysiological indices of covert attentional selection of these objects and a reduction in the overt deployment of the eyes to the location of the objects. This control is established before the distractor appears and is predicted by the power of cue-elicited α activity over the visual cortex. Foreknowledge of distractor characteristics therefore leads to improved selective control, and α oscillations in visual cortex reflect the implementation of this strategic, proactive mechanism.
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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.