ArticlePLoS biology2023
Suppression of distracting inputs by visual-spatial cues is driven by anticipatory alpha activity.
Article in PLoS biology, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- The puzzle of profitless pre-cues.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Pooled it
- Altered Processing of Auditory Distractions Under Competing Inputs in Children With Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder.Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry · 2026Article
- Load-Dependent Retrospective Attentional Benefits During Visual Working Memory.Neuroscience bulletin · 2026Article
- Not simply two sides of the same coin: Target enhancement and distractor suppression draw on independent neural mechanisms.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2026Article
- Frequency-specific attentional mechanisms phasically modulate the influence of distractors on task performance.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Telephone Games: How Issues With Common Citation Practices Established the Inverse Efficiency Score.Experimental psychology · 2026Review
- Broadband high-frequency activity initializes distractor suppression.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2025Article
- Higher baseline alpha power is associated with faster responses in visual search.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Out of sight, out of mind: Spatial cueing reduces the attentional cost of emotional distractors in emotion-induced blindness.Journal of vision · 2025Article
- Effects of ASMR on mental fatigue recovery revealed by EEG power and brain network analysis.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2025Article
- Distinct and complementary mechanisms of oscillatory and aperiodic alpha activity in visuospatial attention.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- 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
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
Abstract
A growing body of research demonstrates that distracting inputs can be proactively suppressed via spatial cues, nonspatial cues, or experience, which are governed by more than one top-down mechanism of attention. However, how the neural mechanisms underlying spatial distractor cues guide proactive suppression of distracting inputs remains unresolved. Here, we recorded electroencephalography signals from 110 participants in 3 experiments to identify the role of alpha activity in proactive distractor suppression induced by spatial cues and its influence on subsequent distractor inhibition. Behaviorally, we found novel changes in the spatial proximity of the distractor: Cueing distractors far away from the target improves search performance for the target, while cueing distractors close to the target hampers performance. Crucially, we found dynamic characteristics of spatial representation for distractor suppression during anticipation. This result was further verified by alpha power increased relatively contralateral to the cued distractor. At both the between- and within-subjects levels, we found that these activities further predicted the decrement of the subsequent PD component, which was indicative of reduced distractor interference. Moreover, anticipatory alpha activity and its link with the subsequent PD component were specific to the high predictive validity of distractor cue. Together, our results reveal the underlying neural mechanisms by which cueing the spatial distractor may contribute to reduced distractor interference. These results also provide evidence supporting the role of alpha activity as gating by proactive suppression.
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Registered trials
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.