Our behavioral goals shape how we process information viaattentional filters that prioritize goal-relevant information, dictatingboth where we attend and what we attend to. When somethingunexpected or salient appears in the environment, itcaptures our spatial attention. Extensive research has focusedon the spatiotemporal aspects of attentional capture, but whathappens to concurrent nonspatial filters during visual distraction?Here, we demonstrate a novel, broader consequence of distraction:widespread disruption to filters that regulate categoryspecificobject processing. We recorded fMRI while participantsviewed arrays of face/house hybrid images. On distractor-absenttrials, we found robust evidence for the standard signature ofcategory-tuned attentional filtering: greater BOLD activation infusiform face area during attend-faces blocks and in parahippocampalplace area during attend-houses blocks. However, on trialswhere a salient distractor (white rectangle) flashed abruptly arounda nontarget location, not only was spatial attention captured, butthe concurrent category-tuned attentional filter was disrupted,revealing a boost in activation for the to-be-ignored category. Thisdisruption was robust, resulting in errant processing—and earlyon, prioritization—of goal-inconsistent information. These findingsprovide a direct test of the filter disruption theory: that inaddition to disrupting spatial attention, distraction also disruptsnonspatial attentional filters tuned to goal-relevant information.Moreover, these results reveal that, under certain circumstances,the filter disruption may be so profound as to induce a full reversalof the attentional control settings, which carries novel implicationsfor both theory and real-world perception.
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