A central question in attention research is whether the brain can proactively suppress distractor locations within spatial priority maps. Inhibition of return (IOR), slower responses to previously cued locations, provides a critical test case, as behavioral suppression persists during the anticipatory interval before target onset. By reconstructing spatial priority maps from neural activity, we found that robust behavioral IOR occurs without sustained suppression in cortical priority maps across multiple frequency bands. This dissociation reveals that behavioral inhibition operates independently of spatial priority mechanisms, likely reflecting motor or response-level processes rather than perceptual down-weighting. These findings challenge the assumption that behavioral suppression directly reflects anticipatory reconfiguration of spatial priority, with important implications for understanding how attention filters distracting information.
Moorselaar et al. (Tue,) studied this question.