Schedule of Events | Symposia

Alpha Lateralization from Distractors: Suppression-Specific and Domain-General

Poster Session A - Saturday, March 29, 2025, 3:00 – 5:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Joshua Seewald¹ (jseewal1@jh.edu), Natalia Khodayari¹, Howard Egeth¹, Susan Courtney¹; ¹Johns Hopkins University

It has been widely contested whether alpha oscillations, which have been shown to index selective spatial attention, reflect target enhancement, distractor suppression, or a combination of enhancement and suppression. Recent EEG findings in auditory selective attention by Wöstmann et al (2019) showed suppression-specific neural oscillations in the alpha band independent of target enhancement effects. These results suggest that the neural processes underlying alpha lateralization in auditory selective attention include both target enhancement and distractor suppression. It is unclear, however, whether these findings are specific to auditory selective attention or are instead domain-general. Here, we examined whether Wöstmann and colleagues’ alpha lateralization results are domain-general by adapting their study to a selective visual attention task using EEG. Analogous to Wöstmann’s design, in our task the location of a target shape singleton was cued with 100% validity. The location of a distractor color singleton (present in all trials) was associated, with 100% validity, with the target location; when the target was lateral the distractor was midline, and vice versa. This allowed us to examine lateral enhancement effects independently from lateral suppression effects. The topography of lateral suppression effects found during our visual attention task replicated those found in Wöstmann’s auditory attention task. Combined, these results validate Wöstmann’s previous findings that alpha lateralization reflects a combination of neural processes of both enhancement and suppression. These results also suggest that these suppression-specific alpha oscillations are domain-general and not specific to auditory selective attention.

Topic Area: ATTENTION: Spatial