We uploaded a revised version of our paper titled: “Time-dependent inhibition of covert shift of attention” on bioRxiv. You can find the paper at this link: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.07.17.207928

In the original version of the manuscript, we reported an inhibitory effect of a visual transients during a covert orienting task requiring discrimination of a tilted gabor. The inhibitory effect was taking place only at specific time intervals after cue onset, with greatest interference during reorienting behavior, 190 to 240 ms after cue onset.

We suggest that this time-dependent inhibition relies on similarly mechanisms of the well-know saccadic inhibition, in which any visual transient can interfere with eye movement preparation only at a specific time point, about 90 ms before the movement is executed.

We now add a completely new experiment in which we also test the early component of this interference and, with surprise, we do not see any clear inhibitory effect at the early stages of attentional deployment. On the other hand, we confirm the later inhibition (200 ms) in which the visual transient actively interferes with the attentional reorienting process.