What is it about?
Strong visual distractions may automatically capture our attention, but here we show that the trained brain can rapidly suppress such distractions to help us efficiently find what we are looking for.
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Photo by Artyom Korshunov on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Choosing what to attend to is very important for visual perception, and behavior in general. Even though the brain has impressive processing power, it simply cannot handle all available information at once. Attention needs to strike a balance between our own internally generated goals and whatever appears to be important in the environment. Dealing with distraction in an efficient way is a crucial aspect of that process, that we now understand a little bit better.
Perspectives
We hope that this study helps resolve a long-standing debate that was lacking in neuronal data.
Chris Klink
Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Inversion of pop-out for a distracting feature dimension in monkey visual cortex, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, February 2023, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2210839120.
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