Neural mechanisms underlying distractor inhibition on the basis of feature and/or spatial expectations

Abstract

A rapidly growing body of research indicates that inhibition of distracting information may not be under flexible, top-down control, but instead heavily relies on expectations derived from past experience about the likelihood of events. Yet, how expectations about distracting information influence distractor inhibition at the neural level remains unclear. To determine how expectations induced by distractor features and/or location regularities modulate distractor processing, we measured EEG while participants performed two variants of the additional singleton paradigm. Critically, in these different variants, target and distractor features either randomly swapped across trials, or were fixed, allowing for the development of distractor feature-based expectations. Moreover, the task was initially performed without any spatial regularity, after which a high probability distractor location was introduced. Our results show that both distractor feature- and location regularities contributed to distractor inhibition, as indicated by corresponding reductions in distractor costs during visual search and an earlier distractor-evoked Pd component. Yet, control analyses showed that while observers were sensitive to regularities across longer time scales, the observed effects to a large extent reflected intertrial repetition. Large individual differences further suggest a functional dissociation between early and late Pd components, with the former reflecting early sensory suppression related to intertrial priming and the latter reflecting suppression sensitive to expectations derived over a longer time scale. Also, counter to some previous findings, no increase in anticipatory alpha-band activity was observed over visual regions representing the expected distractor location, although this effect should be interpreted with caution as the effect of spatial statistical learning was also less pronounced than in other studies. Together, these findings suggest that intertrial priming and statistical learning may both contribute to distractor suppression and reveal the underlying neural mechanisms.