INVESTIGATING THE NEURAL MARKERS FOR ATTENTION HOLD

We investigated whether sustained posterior contralateral negativity (SPCN) serves as a neural marker of attentional hold. Thirty-four participants completed a dot-probe task with face-noise and place-noise image pairs while behavioral responses and EEG were recorded. Twenty-four datasets were retained after exclusion of excessively noisy EEG. Behavioral analyses at the primary 900-ms interval showed a reliable validity effect for both conditions, with a larger effect for faces, consistent with stronger attentional hold. ERP analyses, however, did not support the prediction that SPCN would track this behavioral pattern. Instead, stronger lateralized posterior activity was observed in the place-noise condition, and additional findings suggested possible overlapping contributions of attentional capture and suppression. Together, these results indicate that SPCN does not provide a straightforward index of attentional hold and that behavioral and electrophysiological measures may reflect partially dissociable attentional mechanisms.