Abstract
Salient objects often capture our attention, serving as distractors and hindering our current goals. It remains unclear when and how salient distractors interact with our goals, and our knowledge on the neural mechanisms responsible for attentional capture is limited to a few brain regions recorded from non-human primates. Here we conducted a multivariate analysis on human intracranial signals covering most brain regions and successfully dissociated distractor-specific representations from target-arousal signals in the high-frequency (60–100 Hz) activity. We found that salient distractors were processed rapidly around 220 ms, while target-tuning attention was attenuated simultaneously, supporting initial capture by distractors. Notably, neuronal activity specific to the distractor representation was strongest in the superior and middle temporal gyrus, amygdala and anterior cingulate cortex, while there were smaller contributions from the parietal and frontal cortices. These results provide neural evidence for attentional capture by salient distractors engaging a much larger network than previously appreciated.
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Data availability
As the iEEG data are being used in ongoing studies, we are unable to share them at this time. However, should researchers express interest in replicating our study, we will share the derived iEEG data upon request.
Code availability
The code we used can be accessed through https://github.com/wangbenchi/Shared_data (ref. 78).
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Acknowledgements
This research was supported by the National Science and Technology Innovation 2030 Major Program (grant no. 2022ZD0204802 to B.W.), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant no. 32000738 to B.W.) and the Sanming Project of Medicine in Shenzhen (grant no. SZSM202003006 to X.M.). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.
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R.L., X.M., F.C., X.L. and B.W. designed the experiment. R.L., X.M. and F.C. collected the data. R.L. and B.W. analysed the data. R.L., O.J., J.T. and B.W. wrote the paper.
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Lin, R., Meng, X., Chen, F. et al. Neural evidence for attentional capture by salient distractors. Nat Hum Behav 8, 932–944 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-024-01852-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-024-01852-5
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