What is it about?
How does visual perception interact with the exploration of our world. This study showed that the brain lower visual sensitivity during the window of an attention shift. Unlike saccadic suppression, however, this active suppression arises in higher-order parietal cortex, suggesting it may be built into the very machinery of the attentional network.
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Why is it important?
Perception is not a passive process. During saccades, the brain uses its own motor commands to adjust the sensory system in real time, actively canceling out the disturbances. Shifting of attention bears a striking functional resemblance to a saccade. Whether it too is accompanied by an active, neural down-regulation of perceptual sensitivity? To examine it, we exploited the rhythmic nature of attention to predict the moment of an attention shift at millisecond resolution. Meanwhile, we used an eye tracker and magnetoencephalography (MEG) to record the pupillary and neural responses evoked by task-irrelevant probes—a way of reading out changes in visual sensitivity "passively," without interference.
Perspectives
This project has been an exciting journey for me. Combining a finely designed paradigm with cutting-edge neuroimaging, we managed to answer a question that had been hard to tackle before.
Jiedong Zhang
University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Sensitivity suppression during attention shifts, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, June 2026, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2530939123.
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