Ignoring visual distractors: Habituation to onsets is driven by time-based expectation

An increasing bulk of evidence shows that through different mechanisms, experienced-based or voluntary, reactive or proactive, human beings can attenuate the distracting impact of salient visual, albeit irrelevant, stimuli. Current mechanisms assume that this is achieved by suppressing the salient distractor's features or location at the priority map level, or at lower dimension-based maps levels. However, this functional architecture has so far ignored the role of time in distractors filtering, a key question that we have addressed in the present study. We found that during a visual discrimination task, a "standard" onset distractor, always appearing at the same interval from the beginning of the trial, was subject to habituation. Crucially, however, when the onset distractor was unfrequently presented with an unexpected 1-second delay, it reboosted capture at full strength, while the "standard" distractor continued to remain overall habituated. As predicted by Sokolov's (1963, Annual Review of Physiology, 25[1], 545-580) theory, our results show that habituation mechanisms filter the irrelevant distracting sensory input also on the basis of its temporal parameters. We conclude that habituation to onsets is controlled also by time-based expectation mechanisms and suggest that more recently proposed theories of distractors filtering should also incorporate the temporal parameter among the factors that allow an efficient handling of visual distraction.