View article

The concept of a" template for rejection", or the activation of distractor visual information to benefit subsequent target detection, has been hotly contested in recent years. Is a distractor enhanced like a target with an additional" tag" that it should be rejected once it has been detected during search? Or is it already inhibited during the preparatory period, biasing attention towards other features (including the target) of the upcoming search display? Here, subjects were required to detect a target in an array containing four items of one color and four items of a second color, while undergoing fMRI. One of the two colors was cued beforehand as positive (" the target will appear in this color"), negative (" only distractors will appear in this color"), or neutral (" this color will not appear in the search display"). We used representational similarity analysis within different regions of visual cortex to investigate how distinctly these …