Voluntary attention is at the core of a wide variety of cognitive functions. Attention can be oriented to and sustained at a location or reoriented in space to allow processing at other locations-critical in an everchanging environment. Numerous studies have investigated attentional orienting in time and space, but little is known about the spatiotemporal dynamics of attentional reorienting. Here we explicitly manipulated attentional reorienting using a cuing procedure in a twoalternative forced-choice orientation-discrimination task. We interrogated attentional distribution by flashing two probe stimuli with various delays between the precue and target stimuli. Then we used the probabilities that both probes and neither probe were correctly reported to solve a second-degree equation, which estimates the report probability at each probe location. We demonstrated that attention reorients periodically at ;4 Hz (theta) between the two stimulus locations. We further characterized the processing dynamics at each stimulus location, and demonstrated that attention samples each location periodically at ;11 Hz (alpha). Finally, simulations support our findings and show that this method is sufficiently powered, making it a valuable tool for studying the spatiotemporal dynamics of attention.

Cognitive control is supported by theta band (4-7Hz) neural oscillations coordinating neural populations for task implementation. Task performance has been shown to depend on theta amplitude but a second critical aspect of theta oscillations, its peak frequency, has mostly been overlooked. Using modelling, behavioral and electrophysiological recordings, we show that theta oscillations adapt to task demands by shifting towards the optimal frequency..

Cognitive control is supported by theta band (4-7Hz) neural oscillations that coordinate distant neural populations for task implementation. Task performance has been shown to depend on theta amplitude but a second critical aspect of theta oscillations, its peak frequency, has mostly been overlooked. Using modelling, behavioral and electrophysiological recordings, we show that theta oscillations adapt to task demands by shifting towards the optimal frequency.

We examined the effect of combined top‐down and bottom‐up attentional control sources, using known attention‐related EEG components that are thought to reflect target selection (N2pc) and distractor suppression (PD). We used endogenous cues (valid vs. neutral) for top‐down attentional control, and salience in the form of color singletons (either the target or a distractor) for bottom‐up attentional control in visual search. Crucially, in two experiments, the task was of increasing difficulty, reporting the orientation of a tilted target (Experiment 1), or the position of a small gap within the target among tilted non‐targets (Experiment 2). Our results showed strong cueing effects on RT and accuracy in both experiments, demonstrating a general facilitation of responses to validly cued targets. Whereas the processing of salient targets was not improved compared with non‐salient targets, the presence of a salient distractor consistently worsened performance. The N2pc and PD were only observed in trials where targets were preceded by neutral cues in Experiment 1, and for validly cued targets and salient neutrally cued targets in Experiment 2. A cueing effect was found on the PD in Experiment 1, showing an amplitude reduction in trials where the target was validly cued. These results support the idea that bottom‐up attentional allocation occurs only when top‐down allocation of attention is absent or inefficient. Therefore, these results indicate that attentional selection and suppression during visual search are both influenced by top‐down cueing and give support to theories that focus on the interaction between the two types of attention.