Attention articles from across Nature Portfolio

This Perspective argues for a revised mechanism for the functional role of alpha oscillations. While alpha oscillations reflect inhibition, they are controlled by an indirect mechanism governed by the load of goal-relevant information.

A large network of brain regions is involved in salient distractor processing.

Our study successfully tracks salient distracting signals in high-frequency activity obtained from human intracranial recordings. We observed that the temporal lobe has a critical role in reacting to salient distractors, whereas the parietal and frontal cortices seem to be less important than previously thought.

Recent studies have suggested that attention switches rhythmically, with up to eight cycles per second. An article by Brookshire calls these results into question, showing that widely used methods in the field do not separate rhythmic from arrhythmic structure.