Previous research has shown that visually responsive neurons in the frontal eye field of macaque monkeys select the target for a saccade during efficient, pop-out visual search through suppression of the representation of the nontarget distractors. For a fraction of these neurons, the magnitude of this distractor suppression varied with the proximity of the target to the receptive field, exhibiting more suppression of the distractor representation when the target was nearby than when the target was distant. The purpose of this study was to determine whether the variation of distractor suppression related to target proximity varied with target-distractor feature similarity. The effect of target proximity on distractor suppression did not vary with target-distractor similarity and therefore may be an endogenous property of the selection process.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1152/jn.00780.2003 | DOI Listing |
Atten Percept Psychophys
January 2025
Department of Psychology, The Ohio State University, 225 Psychology Building, 1835 Neil Ave, Columbus, OH, 43210, USA.
Humans can learn to attentionally suppress salient, irrelevant information when it consistently appears at a predictable location. While this ability confers behavioral benefits by reducing distraction, the full scope of its utility is unknown. As people locomote and/or shift between task contexts, known-to-be-irrelevant locations may change from moment to moment.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPLoS Biol
January 2025
Institute of Applied and Computational Mathematics, Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas, Heraklion, Crete, Greece.
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.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBiol Psychol
January 2025
Center for Human Brain Health and School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, UK.
This paper has two concurrent goals. On one hand, we hope it will serve as a simple primer in the use of linear mixed modelling (LMM) for inferential statistical analysis of multimodal data. We describe how LMM can be easily adopted for the identification of trial-wise relationships between disparate measures and provide a brief cookbook for assessing the suitability of LMM in your analyses.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Neurosci
January 2025
Department of Psychology, University of Lübeck, Lübeck, Germany.
Amplitude compression is an indispensable feature of contemporary audio production and especially relevant in modern hearing aids. The cortical fate of amplitude-compressed speech signals is not well-studied, however, and may yield undesired side effects: We hypothesize that compressing the amplitude envelope of continuous speech reduces neural tracking. Yet, leveraging such a 'compression side effect' on unwanted, distracting sounds could potentially support attentive listening if effectively reducing their neural tracking.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInterference from a salient distractor is typically reduced when the appearance of the distractor follows either spatial or feature-based regularities. Although there is a growing body of literature on distractor location learning, the understanding of distractor feature learning remains limited. In the current study, we investigated distractor feature learning by using EEG measures.
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