Our latest study, “Pre-search attentional focus supports learned suppression in visual search”, has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience and is now available as a preprint on bioRxiv:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.29.656755v1

Background

In everyday life, salient but irrelevant information—such as flashing notifications or sudden noises—often captures our attention and disrupts goal-directed behavior. Recent studies suggest that the brain can learn to suppress such distractions based on past experiences, especially when they follow statistical regularities. However, how the brain implements this suppression in advance—and whether attention plays a role in the process—remains unclear.

What We Did

In this study, we used electroencephalography (EEG) combined with frequency tagging to track participants’ brain responses while they performed a visual search task. Certain locations were more likely to contain distractors, allowing participants to implicitly learn and adapt.

Key Findings

• Behaviorally, participants showed reduced distraction at high-probability distractor locations—demonstrating successful statistical learning-based suppression.
• Neurally, we observed stronger frequency tagging responses at high-probability locations before the search display appeared, along with a general decrease in alpha-band power.
• Surprisingly, these results suggest that attentional focus is deployed to distractor-prone locations before suppression occurs—challenging the traditional view that attention and suppression are opposing processes.

Why It Matters

This study provides direct neural evidence that the brain may proactively attend to distracting locations as part of a suppression strategy. This “attend-to-suppress” mechanism reshapes our understanding of attention control and has broad implications for theories of cognitive control and learning.