The ability to suppress distractions is essential to successful completion of goal-directed behaviors. Several behavioral studies have recently provided strong evidence that learned suppression may be particularly efficient in reducing distractor interference. Expectations about a distractor's repeated location, color, or even presence are rapidly learned and used to attenuate interference. In this study, we use a visual search paradigm in which a color singleton, which is known to capture attention, occurs within blocks with high or low frequency. The behavioral results show reduced singleton interference during the high compared to the low frequency block (Won et al., 2019). The fMRI results provide evidence that the attenuation of distractor interference is supported by changes in singleton, target, and non-salient distractor representations within retinotopic visual cortex. These changes in visual cortex are accompanied by findings that singleton-present trials compared to non-singleton trials produce greater activation in bilateral parietal cortex, indicative of attentional capture, in low frequency, but not high frequency blocks. Together, these results suggest that the readout of saliency signals associated with an expected color singleton from visual cortex is suppressed, resulting in less competition for attentional priority in frontoparietal attentional control regions.

抑制干扰的能力对于成功完成目标导向的行为至关重要。最近的几项行为研究提供了强有力的证据，表明习得性抑制可能对减少分心干扰特别有效。对干扰物重复位置、颜色甚至存在的期望会被快速学习并用于减弱干扰。在本研究中，我们使用视觉搜索范例，其中已知会吸引注意力的颜色单例出现在高频或低频的块内。行为结果显示，与低频块相比，高频块期间的单例干扰减少（Won 等人，2019）。功能磁共振成像结果提供的证据表明，视网膜专题视觉皮层内单个、目标和非显着干扰物表征的变化支持干扰物干扰的衰减。视觉皮层的这些变化伴随着以下发现：与非单例试验相比，单例试验在双侧顶叶皮层产生更大的激活，表明低频块中的注意力捕获，但高频块中则不然。总之，这些结果表明，与来自视觉皮层的预期颜色单例相关的显着性信号的读出被抑制，导致额顶叶注意力控制区域对注意力优先级的竞争减少。