Citation

Moher J, Lakshmanan BM, Egeth HE, Ewen JB. Psychol. Sci. 2014; 25(2): 315-324.

Affiliation

1Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Johns Hopkins University.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2014, Association for Psychological Science, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1177/0956797613511257

PMID

24390823

Abstract

Attention can modulate processing of visual input according to task-relevant features, even as early as approximately 100 ms after stimulus presentation. In the present study, event-related potential and behavioral data revealed that inhibition of distractor features, rather than activation of target features, is the primary driver of early feature-based selection in human observers. This discovery of inhibition consistent with task goals during early visual processing suggests that inhibition plays a much larger role at an earlier stage of target selection than previously recognized. It also highlights the importance of understanding the role of inhibition (in addition to activation) in attention.

Language: en