UCLA

To protect our capacity-limited mental workspace from sensory overload, attentional processes guide our selection of relevant information and concurrently block out distractions. This ‘top-down’ control mechanism is characterized by the enhancement of neural activity in sensory cortices that represent relevant stimuli and the suppression of neural activity associated with irrelevant information. This article examines what functional neuroimaging studies have revealed about the brain systems mediating top-down suppression and highlights the similarities of this process across four different types of to-be-ignored information: spatial locations, features, objects, and internally generated items.