Complementary role of frontal theta and parietal alpha activity in resolving visual competition

The brain processes vast information every second, much of which is irrelevant. Given the massive distracting information in which a target is embedded, the ability to manage distractions becomes the determinant of efficient information processing. Fortunately, the visual world is not entirely random; prior knowledge about targets and distractors can guide strategic attentional allocation. However, the neural mechanisms underlying this process remain incompletely understood. Using a binocular rivalry paradigm with flickering stimuli, we examined the rhythmic neural dynamics modulating target and distractor processing. Participants were cued in advance about the feature of the target or distractor on each trial. There was a behavioral enhancement in the target-cueing condition but no significant benefit or cost was observed in the distractor-cueing condition. Single-trial analyses showed that the absence of distractor-related cost was driven by reactive inhibition control, characterized by pronounced frontal theta activity that reduced the sensory gain of the distractor during rivalry. Additionally, distractor cues produced stronger alpha activity over parietal areas, reflecting enhanced attentional gating. This gating mechanism subserves the segregation of competing visual inputs, stabilizing perception by facilitating target identification and isolating distractors, without directly modulating sensory gain. These findings reveal that resolving competition between rivalrous stimuli is achieved through complementary neural mechanisms of reactive direct inhibition and proactive indirect gating, mediated by temporally dissociable theta and alpha oscillations.