Suppression of distracting inputs by visual-spatial cues is driven by anticipatory alpha activity

Abstract

A growing body of research demonstrates that distracting inputs can be proactively suppressed via spatial cues, nonspatial cues, or experience, which are governed by more than one top-down mechanism of attention. However, how the neural mechanisms underlying spatial distractor cues guide proactive suppression of distracting inputs remains unresolved. Here, we recorded electroencephalography signals from 110 participants in 3 experiments to identify the role of alpha activity in proactive distractor suppression induced by spatial cues and its influence on subsequent distractor inhibition. Behaviorally, we found novel changes in the spatial proximity of the distractor: Cueing distractors far away from the target improves search performance for the target, while cueing distractors close to the target hampers performance. Crucially, we found dynamic characteristics of spatial representation for distractor suppression during anticipation. This result was further verified by alpha power increased relatively contralateral to the cued distractor. At both the between- and within-subjects levels, we found that these activities further predicted the decrement of the subsequent PD component, which was indicative of reduced distractor interference. Moreover, anticipatory alpha activity and its link with the subsequent PD component were specific to the high predictive validity of distractor cue. Together, our results reveal the underlying neural mechanisms by which cueing the spatial distractor may contribute to reduced distractor interference. These results also provide evidence supporting the role of alpha activity as gating by proactive suppression.

An AAV capsid reprogrammed to bind human transferrin receptor mediates brain-wide gene delivery

“…As compared with AAV9 and AAV2, BI-hTFR1 was more efficiently transported across a human brain endothelial cell layer and transduced cells throughout the brains and spinal cords of TFRC KI mice after intravenous delivery. BI-hTFR1 exhibited a broad CNS tropism enhancement similar to those of engineered mouse BBBcrossing capsids that bind to mouse glycosylphosphatidylinositol (GPI)-anchored proteins (21,45,46). By engaging highly abundant CNS endothelial cell-surface proteins as receptors, these capsids efficiently cross the BBB.…”

Alpha Oscillations in Resisting Distraction

“…Other studies failed to find such a link (see below) but a recent attention study provided strong evidence in favor of a link between alpha increase and distractor suppression by showing an inverse relationship between alpha power and the Pd component which indexes distractor interference (Zhao et al, 2023; see also Dou et al, 2021;Iemi et al, 2019).…”

“…In visual attention tasks, several studies have observed alpha power increases in the areas related to unattended locations and features (Antonov et al, 2020;Capilla et al, 2014b;Frey et al, 2014;Green et al, 2017;Gundlach et al, 2020;Gutteling et al, 2022;Ikkai et al, 2016;Kelly et al, 2006;Rihs et al, 2007Rihs et al, , 2009Rösner et al, 2020a;Sauseng et al, 2009;Schneider et al, 2022;Siegel et al, 2008;Wildegger et al, 2017;Zhao et al, 2023;Zhigalov & Jensen, 2020;Zoest et al, 2021). In spatial somatosensory and auditory tasks, a few studies have also reported an alpha power increase (compared to baseline) over areas contralateral to the distractors (i.e.…”

Willed Attentional Selection of Visual Features: An EEG Study

“…Specifically, when participants are cued to shift their attention to the left (right) visual field, there is a greater suppression of alpha power over the right (left) posterior scalp [8][9][10]. Such a similarity between pre-cue and post-cue alpha activity thus indicates that voluntary attention decisions could be biased by the pattern of ongoing brain activity, as alpha oscillations were supposed to reflect functional inhibition of task-irrelevant information [11,12]. Considering that alpha activity might play a similar role in feature- [8] and object-based [13] attention, one might be interested in whether the prediction of choice from ongoing alpha activity in spatial willed-attention can be generalized to feature-or object-based attentional task.…”