Flexibility in Attentional Control: Multiple Sources and Suppression

In daily life, it is critical that we are able to direct our visual attention to information that is important for our tasks while avoiding distracting information. To control our attention, we engage “attentional templates” that reconfigure how incoming visual signals are processed in our brains. But what are these attentional templates and how do they work? Much of our understanding of the nature of attentional templates has been driven by the proposed mechanism linking attentional templates and working memory from the biased competition model [1] (Desimone and Duncan, 1995). Over the past 20 years, research inspired by this proposal has vastly increased our understanding of attentional control. This work has highlighted flexibility in attentional control, with multiple sources of control and flexible enhancement or suppression based on task demands.