The costly filtering of potential distraction: Evidence for a supramodal mechanism.

Abstract

When dealing with significant sensory stimuli, performance can be hampered by distracting events. Attention mechanisms lessen such negative effects, enabling selection of relevant information while blocking potential distraction. Recent work shows that preparatory brain activity, occurring before a critical stimulus, may reflect mechanisms of attentional control aimed to filter upcoming distracters. However, it is unknown whether the engagement of these filtering mechanisms to counteract distraction in itself taxes cognitive-brain systems, leading to performance costs. Here we address this question and, specifically, seek the behavioral signature of a mechanism for the filtering of potential distraction within and between sensory modalities. We show that, in potentially distracting contexts, a filtering mechanism is engaged to cope with forthcoming distraction, causing a dramatic behavioral cost in no-distracter trials during a speeded tactile discrimination task. We thus demonstrate an impaired processing caused by a potential, yet absent, distracter. This effect generalizes across different sensory modalities, such as vision and audition, and across different manipulations of the context, such as the distracter's sensory modality and pertinence to the task. Moreover, activation of the filtering mechanism relies on both strategic and reactive processes, as shown by its dynamic dependence on probabilistic and cross-trial contingencies. Crucially, across participants, the observed strategic cost is inversely related to the interference exerted by a distracter on distracter-present trials. These results attest to a mechanism for the monitoring and filtering of potential distraction in the human brain. Although its activation is indisputably beneficial when distraction occurs, it leads to robust costs when distraction is actually expected but currently absent.

Disentangling the Role of Cortico-Basal Ganglia Loops in Top–Down and Bottom–Up Visual Attention: An Investigation of Attention Deficits in Parkinson Disease

“…A deficit of inhibitory mechanisms is compatible with the notion that PD leads to weakened top-down attention, given that the ability to suppress (potential) distraction is at the core of such form of control (Marini, Chelazzi, & Maravita, 2013). The idea that PD leads to a deficit of the specific mechanisms responsible for the inhibition of irrelevant stimuli has been also supported by studies on negative priming (Houghton & Tipper, 1994), which is held to directly reflect the intervention of inhibitory mechanisms of attention.…”

Crossmodal representation of a functional robotic hand arises after extensive training in healthy participants

“…As agreed by several authors (Shore et al, 2006;Forster & Pavone, 2008;Spence et al, 2004a;see also discussion in Marini, Chelazzi, & Maravita, 2012),a major factor contributing to the visuotactile interference effect is probably a response-related competition (Eriksen & Eriksen, 1974; see also discussion in Spence et al 2004a). Incongruent distracters can involuntarily prime the activation of an erroneous response in the stimulus-response mapping, which will compete with the correct response primed by the relevant target stimulus.…”

“…Since it offers a more reliable measure of performance in tasks where both speed and accuracy index performance, inverse efficiency has been extensively used in previous studies that used the crossmodal congruency paradigm (e.g., Holmes et al, 2004;Heed et al, 2010;Marini et al, 2012).…”

“…The visuo-tactile interference typically observed in this paradigm is thought to be mediated by multiple components, namely, response-related factors such as conflict due to the involuntary activation of the motor response associated with the distracter on incongruent trials (Spence et al, 2004a;Shore, Barnes, & Spence, 2006;Forster & Pavone, 2008), as well as attentional and perceptual-related factors (Shore et al, 2006;Spence et al, 2004a; see also discussion in Marini, Chelazzi, & Maravita, 2012). Given that this paradigm relies on multiple mechanisms at different stages of processing of crossmodal stimuli, it is an ideal candidate for assessing the multisensory properties of the space around the body (Spence, Pavani, Maravita, & Holmes, 2004b).…”

Increased attentional load moves the left to the right

“…This finding was interpreted by assuming the presence of limited and depletable supramodal attentional resources. After brain damage, contralesional awareness would be present only when attention is fully allocated to spatial monitoring, as in the case of clinical tests and of the easy, single-task, condition (see Bonato, 2012, for review;and Marini, Chelazzi & Maravita, 2013 for a study with healthy participants). Our approach integrates two lines of evidence about load effects on spatial processing.…”