Getting rid of visual distractors: the why, when, how, and where.

Distractor suppression, or the ability to disregard salient distractors while dealing with task-relevant information, is a key component of selective attention. Recent research has shown that distractor suppression can take place in different circumstances and present itself in different guises, which is presumably paralleled by a multiplicity of underlying neural mechanisms. In this review article, we discuss a number of central themes concerning distractor suppression and the underlying neural mechanisms, and also highlight several unresolved issues that will have to be addressed in future investigations.