Unpredictability impairs goal-directed target processing and performance

Unpredictability influences emotion and attention, but its effects on goal-directed behavior are unclear. We examined whether unpredictable events interfere with performance, using event-related potentials to specify underlying attentional dynamics. The paradigm involved task-irrelevant distracters of either predictable or unpredictable content (neutral/negative) preceding targets of a stimulus discrimination task. Mean and single-trial analyses...