How do people prepare for the presentation of distractors?

What is it about?

What will you do when you know a distraction is coming up? Ideally, you might want to shut down your system before the distraction appears in order to minimize interference. However, it turns out that the attentional system increases, rather than decreases, resources before the presentation of distractors, even though it is clear that the only stimuli about to appear are distracting.

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Why is it important?

Most of the attention research has focused on how we filter out irrelevant information once it appears. This study shifts the focus to a related, often overlooked, question of whether and how our visual system prepares for the processing of irrelevant distractors prior to their presentation. The reported experiments revealed what seems to be a core principle of attention: more attentional resources are allocated when a distraction is expected. That is, when you are about to encounter a distracting billboard on your route, you are more likely to increase your alertness, rather than inhibit the upcoming distraction in advance.