Paper accepted in J Neurosci

Ferrante, O., Jensen, O. and Hickey, C. (accepted)  Predictive distractor processing relies on integrated proactive and reactive attentional mechanisms. J Neurosci

Using MEG with time-resolved multivariate decoding, we examined whether statistically learned distractor locations are proactively represented in brain activity. During a visual search task with a spatially biased distractor, classifiers decoded distractor location both before stimulus onset and after distractor presentation, with source reconstruction implicating temporo-occipital cortex and temporal generalisation emerging at ~200 ms but not at early sensory latencies. Speaking to a long-standing debate on distractor suppressions, these findings show that proactive and reactive distractor suppression draw on shared, temporally specific attentional mechanisms shaped by statistical learning.