{"doi":"10.1038/s42003-025-08321-3","title":"Guided visual search is associated with target boosting and distractor suppression in early visual cortex","abstract":"Visual attention paradigms have revealed that neural excitability in higher-order visual areas is modulated according to a priority map guiding attention towards task-relevant locations. Neural activity in early visual regions, however, has been argued to be modulated based on bottom-up salience. Here, we combined Magnetoencephalography (MEG) and Rapid Invisible Frequency Tagging (RIFT) in a classic visual search paradigm to study feature-guidance in early human visual cortex. Our results demonstrate evidence for both target boosting and distractor suppression when the participants were informed about the task-relevant and -irrelevant colour (guided search) compared to when they were not (unguided search). These results conceptually replicated using both a magnitude-squared coherence approach and a General Linear Model based on a single-trial measure of the RIFT response. The present findings reveal that feature-guidance in visual search affects neuronal excitability as early as primary visual cortex, possibly contributing to a priority-map-based mechanism.","journal":"Communications Biology","year":2025,"id":516715,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":9,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9529,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2025-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":1382524,"name":"Kimron L. Shapiro","orcid":"0000-0002-0419-1460","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1353350,"name":"Simon Hanslmayr","orcid":"0000-0003-4448-2147","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1382525,"name":"Benjamin Griffiths","orcid":"0000-0001-8600-4480","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1382526,"name":"Yali Pan","orcid":"0000-0003-0062-4326","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":402215,"name":"Jeremy M. Wolfe","orcid":"0000-0002-6475-1984","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1051081,"name":"Ole Jensen","orcid":"0000-0001-8193-8348","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1013499,"name":"Katharina Duecker","orcid":"0000-0001-7887-3395","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":108,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:48:54.768083Z","pmid":"40500285","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}