Neural evidence for dynamic within-trial changes in allocation of visual attention

In their article "Progress toward resolving the attentional capture debate", Luck et al. (2021. Progress toward resolving the attentional capture debate. Visual Cognition, 29(1), 1–21.) aim at reconciling stimulus-driven, goal-driven and signal suppression accounts of visual attention. At the center of their model is a "control state" that determines activations on a priority map and thus under which circumstances a stimulus captures attention or can be suppressed. In this commentary I will outline neural evidence that suggests that various factors simultaneously affect the control state and that speak against a dichotomy of "attentional capture versus suppression." For example, EEG studies using event-related potentials (ERPs) suggest that attention can be captured without suppression, that suppression can be applied reactively as a response to capture, and suppression can be proactively applied to prevent capture. ERP results furthermore suggest that different degrees of attentional enhancement and suppression are applied to stimuli and that attentional subprocesses are interdependent. This indicates that the priority map can change dynamically within a trial, and behavioral effects may be a snapshot of a specific distribution of resources on the priority map at a particular moment. I suggest that EEG measures can be used to quantify the relative contribution of attentional factors to determine attention deployment under those circumstances.