Diverse neuronal activity patterns contribute to the control of distraction in the prefrontal and parietal cortex.

Goal-directed behavior requires the effective suppression of distractions to focus on the task at hand. Although experimental evidence suggests that brain areas in the prefrontal and parietal lobe contribute to the selection of task-relevant and the suppression of task-irrelevant stimuli, how conspicuous distractors are encoded and effectively ignored remains poorly understood. We recorded neuronal responses from 2 regions in the prefrontal and parietal cortex of macaques, the frontal eye fields (FEFs) and the lateral intraparietal (LIP) area, during a visual search task, in the presence and absence of a salient distractor.