Boulinguez, P.
Centre de Neuroscience Cognitive, UMR CNRS 5229 & Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, France
Questions about attention are usually addressed by cueing tasks assessing whether knowledge of stimulus-related information provided in advance will improve target processing. However, growing evidence suggests that inhibitory control of response is critically involved in such tasks. This control operates in anticipation of stimulus arrival and acts as a gating mechanism intended to withhold automatic responses to visual stimuli in order to prevent false alarms (responses to cues). As a consequence, behavioural and physiological baselines classically used to refer cue-related changes in attention research using standard cue-target detection protocols are biased and multiple cue-induced effects are potentially confounded. Here, I will review EEG, fMRI, behavioural and clinical data in humans revealing this widespread bias, and propose methodological refinements of standard protocols that allow disentangling executive control mechanisms from motor, perceptual and attentional processes.