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research article

Anticipatory and reactive mechanisms of habituation to visual distractors

Burleson, Brant R.
•
Turatto, Massimo
•
Plomp, Gijs
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July 2, 2025
Scientific Reports

Human attention can rapidly habituate to irrelevant and repetitive visual distractors. Although this phenomenon is well-documented in behavioral studies, the neural mechanisms involved remain largely unknown. In this study, we investigated the neural correlates of attentional habituation using scalp electroencephalography (EEG). Participants performed a visual discrimination task while intermittently presented with salient distractor stimuli. The cost in reaction times (RT) associated with the distractor exhibited the typical time course of habituation, decreasing as a function of repeated exposure to the distractor. We found that this habituation coincided with both reactive and proactive changes in EEG activity. Post-distractor reactive EEG components emerged gradually over the course of the experiment, likely reflecting the operation of an inhibitory network aimed at suppressing distractor interference in the main task. Pre-stimulus α rhythms gradually tuned their power peaks to the anticipated moment of the distractor, suggesting the involvement of predictive inhibitory models based on prior experience with the distractor. Collectively, our findings suggest that attentional habituation involves multi-stage interacting mechanisms that anticipate the occurrence of a distractor and facilitate the rapid reallocation of attentional resources away from the distractor.

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Type
research article
DOI
10.1038/s41598-025-04082-5
Author(s)
Burleson, Brant R.

University of Geneva

Turatto, Massimo

University of Trento

Plomp, Gijs

University of Fribourg

Pascucci, David  

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Date Issued

2025-07-02

Publisher

Springer Science and Business Media LLC

Published in
Scientific Reports
Volume

15

Issue

1

Article Number

22953

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
LPSY  
FunderFunding(s)Grant NumberGrant URL

Swiss National Science Foundation

PP00P1_183714,PZ00P1_179988

Available on Infoscience
July 4, 2025
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/251895
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