Though practice can lead to improved performance in many domains, it is currently unknown
how practice affects the deployment of selective attention to filter distracting information. We …

Distractions are ubiquitous in our sensory environments. How do we keep them from
capturing attention? Existing research has focused primarily on mechanisms of strategic …

Our sensory environments contain more information than we can process, and successful
behaviors require the ability to separate task-relevant information from task-irrelevant …

Distraction impairs performance of many important, everyday tasks. Attentional control limits
distraction by preferentially selecting important items for limited-capacity cognitive …

Learning to ignore distractors is critical for navigating the visual world. Research has
suggested that a location frequently containing a salient distractor can be suppressed. How …

For the good and the bad, the world around us is full of distraction. In particular, onset stimuli
that appear abruptly in the scene grab attention, thus disrupting the ongoing task. Different …

Explicit knowledge about upcoming target or distractor features can increase performance in
tasks like visual search. However, explicit distractor cues generally result in smaller …

Despite our best intentions, physically salient but entirely task-irrelevant stimuli can
sometimes capture our attention. With learning, it is possible to more efficiently ignore such …

Recent work has shown that training can improve attentional focus. Little is known, however,
about how training in attention and multitasking affects the brain. We used functional …

Target templates stored in visual memory guide visual attention toward behaviorally relevant
target objects. Visual attention also is guided away from nontarget distractors by longer-term …