Research Article Perceptual-Load-Induced Selection as a Result of Local Competitive Interactions in Visual Cortex

ABSTRACT—A growing literature suggests that the degree to which distracting information can be ignored depends on the perceptual load of the task, or the extent towhich the task exhausts perceptual capacity. However, there is cur-rently no a priori definition of what constitutes high or low perceptual load. We propose that interactions among cells in visual cortex that represent nearby stimuli determine the perceptual load of a task, and that manipulations de-signed to modulate these competitive spatial interactions should modulate distractor processing. We found that ei-ther spatially separating the task-relevant items in a dis-play or placing the target and nontargets in different visual fields increased interference from a distractor that was to be ignored. These data are consistent with the idea that the ability to ignore such distracting information re