To find objects of interest in a cluttered and continually changing visual environment, humans must often ignore salient stimuli that are not currently relevant to the task at hand. Recent neuroimaging results indicate that the ability to prevent salience-driven distraction depends on the current level of attentional control activity in frontal cortex, but the specific mechanism by which this control activity prevents salience-driven distraction is still poorly understood. Here, we asked whether salience-driven distraction is prevented by suppressing salient distractors or by preferentially up-weighting the relevant visual dimension. We found that salient distractors were suppressed even when they resided in the same feature dimension as the target (that is, when dimensional weighting was not a viable selection strategy). Our neurophysiological measure of suppression-the P D component of the event-related potential-was associated with variations in the amount of time it took to perform the search task: distractors triggered the P D on fast-response trials, but on slow-response trials they triggered activity associated with working memory representation instead. These results demonstrate that during search salience-driven distraction is mitigated by a suppressive mechanism that reduces the salience of potentially distracting visual objects.

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Salient distractors delay visual search for less salient targets in additional-singleton tasks, even when the features of the stimuli are fixed across trials. According to the salience-driven selection hypothesis, this delay is due to an initial attentional deployment to the distractor. Recent event-related potential (ERP) studies found no evidence for salience-driven selection in fixed-feature search, but the methods employed were not optimized to isolate distractor ERP components such as the N2pc and distractor positivity (PD; indices of selection and suppression, respectively). Here, we isolated target and distractor ERPs in two fixed-feature search experiments. Participants searched for a shape singleton in the presence of a more-salient color singleton (Experiment 1) or for a color singleton in the presence of a less-salient shape singleton (Experiment 2). The salient distractor did not elicit an N2pc, but it did elicit a PD on fast-response trials. Furthermore, distractors had no effect on the timing of the target N2pc. These results indicate that (a) the distractor was prevented from engaging the attentional mechanism associated with N2pc, (b) the distractor did not interrupt the deployment of attention to the target, and (c) competition for attention can be resolved by suppressing locations of irrelevant items on a salience-based priority map.

According to contemporary accounts of visual working memory (vWM), the ability to efficiently filter relevant from irrelevant information contributes to an individual's overall vWM capacity. Although there is mounting evidence for this hypothesis, very little is known about the precise filtering mechanism responsible for controlling access to vWM and for differentiating low-and high-capacity individuals. Theoretically, the inefficient filtering observed in lowcapacity individuals might be specifically linked to problems enhancing relevant items, suppressing irrelevant items, or both. To find out, we recorded neurophysiological activity associated with attentional selection and active suppression during a competitive visual search task. We show that high-capacity individuals actively suppress salient distractors, whereas low-capacity individuals are unable to suppress salient distractors in time to prevent those items from capturing attention. These results demonstrate that individual differences in vWM capacity are associated with the timing of a specific attentional control operation that suppresses processing of salient but irrelevant visual objects and restricts their access to higher stages of visual processing.suppression | attention | working memory | event-related potentials | distractor positivity E ach day, human observers perform numerous tasks that require temporary storage of information about objects in the surrounding visual environment. Laboratory studies have revealed substantial variability across neurologically healthy adults in the ability to keep such visuospatial information in mind (1-4). Originally, this variability was attributed to individual differences in the capacity of visual working memory (vWM). According to this account, the maximum amount of information that can be entered into vWM at one time, or the number of "slots" available to store the information, varies across individuals (3,(5)(6)(7)(8). Other contemporary accounts, however, relate the individual differences in vWM performance to variability in attentional control, as well as capacity (9-12). One such attention-based perspective holds that when faced with multiple visual objects, low-capacity individuals have difficulty filtering relevant from irrelevant information (11-15). More specifically, this filtering-efficiency hypothesis proposes that attention regulates the flow of sensory information to the limited-capacity vWM system and that consuming capacity with task-irrelevant information effectively reduces storage capacity for task-relevant items. This hypothesis helps to explain why lowcapacity individuals sometimes store more items in vWM than do high-capacity individuals: whereas high-capacity individuals encode only task-relevant items, low-capacity individuals encode irrelevant items along with task-relevant items (15).Although there is mounting evidence for the filtering-efficiency hypothesis, little is known about the precise mechanism responsible for controlling access to vWM or how its operation differs in low...

The computational analyses of genome-enrichment assays, such as ChIP-seq and ATAC-seq, are typically concluded with a peak-calling program that identifies genomic regions that are significantly enriched. The most popular peak-caller, MACS2, assumes that the input alignment files are for single-end sequence reads by default, yet those with paired-end Illumina sequence data frequently use this default setting. This leads to erroneous coverage values and suboptimal peak identification. However, using the correct paired-end mode can introduce another set of artifacts. After thoroughly reviewing the MACS2 source code, we have modified it to limit these and other problems. Our updated version is freely available (https://github.com/jsh58/MACS).

The ability to perform multiple tasks simultaneously has become increasingly important as technologies such as cell phones and portable music players have become more common. In the current study, we examined dual-task costs in older and younger adults using a simulated street crossing task constructed in an immersive virtual environment with an integrated treadmill so that participants could walk as they would in the real world. Participants were asked to cross simulated streets of varying difficulty while either undistracted, listening to music, or conversing on a cell phone. Older adults were more vulnerable to dual-task impairments than younger adults when the crossing task was difficult; dual-task costs were largely absent in the younger adult group. Performance costs in older adults were primarily reflected in timeout rates. When conversing on a cell phone older adults were less likely to complete their crossing compared to when listening to music or undistracted. Analysis of time spent next to the street prior to each crossing, where participants were presumably analyzing traffic patterns and making decisions regarding when to cross, revealed that older adults took longer than younger adults to initiate their crossing, and that this difference was exacerbated during cell phone conversation, suggesting impairments in cognitive planning processes. Our data suggest that multi-tasking costs may be particularly dangerous for older adults even during everyday activities such as crossing the street.

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Assessing how natural environmental drivers affect biodiversity underpins our understanding of the relationships between complex biotic and ecological factors in natural ecosystems. Of all ecosystems, anthropogenically important estuaries represent a ‘melting pot' of environmental stressors, typified by extreme salinity variations and associated biological complexity. Although existing models attempt to predict macroorganismal diversity over estuarine salinity gradients, attempts to model microbial biodiversity are limited for eukaryotes. Although diatoms commonly feature as bioindicator species, additional microbial eukaryotes represent a huge resource for assessing ecosystem health. Of these, meiofaunal communities may represent the optimal compromise between functional diversity that can be assessed using morphology and phenotype–environment interactions as compared with smaller life fractions. Here, using 454 Roche sequencing of the 18S nSSU barcode we investigate which of the local natural drivers are most strongly associated with microbial metazoan and sampled protist diversity across the full salinity gradient of the estuarine ecosystem. In order to investigate potential variation at the ecosystem scale, we compare two geographically proximate estuaries (Thames and Mersey, UK) with contrasting histories of anthropogenic stress. The data show that although community turnover is likely to be predictable, taxa are likely to respond to different environmental drivers and, in particular, hydrodynamics, salinity range and granulometry, according to varied life-history characteristics. At the ecosystem level, communities exhibited patterns of estuary-specific similarity within different salinity range habitats, highlighting the environmental sequencing biomonitoring potential of meiofauna, dispersal effects or both.