Electrophysiological evidence for the voluntary prevention of salience-driven distraction in humans

Poster Session E - Monday, March 9, 2026, 2:30 – 4:30 pm PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballrooms

Daniel Tay¹ (daniel_tay@sfu.ca), John J. McDonald¹; ¹Simon Fraser University

For decades, researchers have sought to determine whether humans can voluntarily resist attention capture by a salient visual distractor. The latest research indicates that when individuals must search for a target in every stimulus array over hundreds of trials, they cannot prevent salience-driven distraction on demand but do so automatically by implicit learning. Using electrophysiological markers of attentional selection (N2pc) and suppression (PD), we investigated whether people can voluntarily prevent salience-driven distraction when they know in advance that search is not required for the upcoming display. On each trial, a 100-ms cue display was followed by a 700–1100-ms blank interval and then a 750-ms array of 16 blue bars. The cue display contained a shape (circle or square) that indicated whether a response was required to indicate presence of an orientation singleton in the subsequent “target” display. Trials that required a response (go trials) and trials that required no response (no-go trials) were equally likely and randomly intermixed. We found that although the singleton elicited the N2pc on go trials, the same singleton elicited the PD on no-go trials. Importantly, preparatory activity that was observed over the anterior scalp in the cue-target interval predicted participants’ reaction times and amplitudes of their N1, N2pc, and singleton detection positivity (SDP) on go trials and their PD on no-go trials. These results demonstrate that people can voluntarily ignore salient distractors by proactively disengaging from search. We surmise that this inhibitory control stems from an executive-control network in frontal brain regions.

Topic Area: ATTENTION: Spatial