Attention: inhibition or facilitation?
What are the mechanisms behind attention, our ability to focus on some aspects or stimuli, and ignore others? Is it due to an inhibition of all other inputs than the attended one or by facilitating the one input and not the others? Or are both mechanisms at stake? A recent neuroimaging study contradicts a widespread […]
What are the mechanisms behind attention, our ability to focus on some aspects or stimuli, and ignore others? Is it due to an inhibition of all other inputs than the attended one or by facilitating the one input and not the others? Or are both mechanisms at stake? A recent neuroimaging study contradicts a widespread belief that attention is due to inhibition, and instead lends support to theories suggesting that facilitation is the primary function in attention.
Neural mechanisms of attention and control: losing our inhibitions?
Sander Nieuwenhuis & Nick Yeung in Nature Neuroscience 8, 1631 – 1633 (2005)
How are we able to focus our attention on the task at hand while ignoring myriad distractions? An elegant neuroimaging study in this issue finds that, contrary to a widely held view, the prefrontal cortex implements attentional control by amplifying task-relevant information, rather than by inhibiting distracting stimuli.
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