Discovery into brain’s antidistraction system

Issue: BCMJ, vol. 56, No. 5, June 2014, Pages 237,243 News

Two Simon Fraser University psychologists have made a brain-related discovery that could help scientists and health care professionals better treat individuals with distraction-related attentional deficits. The study reveals that brains rely on an active suppression mechanism to avoid being distracted by salient but irrelevant information when people want to focus on a particular item or task. Dr John McDonald, a Canada research chair in cognitive neuroscience, and other scientists first discovered the existence of the specific neural index of suppression in his lab in 2009. But, until now, little was known about how it helps people ignore visual distractions. Authors of the study indicate that disorders associated with attention deficits, such as ADHD and schizophrenia, may turn out to be due to difficulties in suppressing irrelevant objects rather than difficulty selecting relevant ones. Researchers are now turning their attention to understanding how people deal with distraction, and looking at when and why people can’t suppress potentially distracting objects, whether some people are better at doing so, and why that is the case.

The paper, “Suppression of Salient Objects Prevents Distraction in Visual Search,” by Dr John McDonald, associate professor of psychology at Simon Fraser University, and his doctoral student, John Gaspar, is published in the Journal of Neuroscience.

. Discovery into brain’s antidistraction system. BCMJ, Vol. 56, No. 5, June, 2014, Page(s) 237,243 - News.



Above is the information needed to cite this article in your paper or presentation. The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) recommends the following citation style, which is the now nearly universally accepted citation style for scientific papers:
Halpern SD, Ubel PA, Caplan AL, Marion DW, Palmer AM, Schiding JK, et al. Solid-organ transplantation in HIV-infected patients. N Engl J Med. 2002;347:284-7.

About the ICMJE and citation styles

The ICMJE is small group of editors of general medical journals who first met informally in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1978 to establish guidelines for the format of manuscripts submitted to their journals. The group became known as the Vancouver Group. Its requirements for manuscripts, including formats for bibliographic references developed by the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), were first published in 1979. The Vancouver Group expanded and evolved into the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), which meets annually. The ICMJE created the Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals to help authors and editors create and distribute accurate, clear, easily accessible reports of biomedical studies.

An alternate version of ICMJE style is to additionally list the month an issue number, but since most journals use continuous pagination, the shorter form provides sufficient information to locate the reference. The NLM now lists all authors.

BCMJ standard citation style is a slight modification of the ICMJE/NLM style, as follows:

  • Only the first three authors are listed, followed by "et al."
  • There is no period after the journal name.
  • Page numbers are not abbreviated.


For more information on the ICMJE Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals, visit www.icmje.org

BCMJ Guidelines for Authors

Leave a Reply