Anticipated moments: temporal structure in attention

Key Points Attention enables the prioritization and selection of relevant sensory inputs and appropriate responses. Understanding the cognitive and neural mechanisms by which attention is allocated to relevant moments in time provides a necessary complement to the study of spatial, feature-based and object-based attention. At least four types of informative temporal structures enable temporal expectations to guide attention in time: cued associations, hazard rates, rhythms and sequences. Their impacts on perception and action need not always run through common mechanisms and may often interact. Investigations of how temporal expectations are controlled and utilized by the brain are only beginning to gain ground but already suggest that there are multiple mechanisms at play, involving, among others, changes in the strength, timing and synchrony of neuronal activity. Temporal expectations often co-occur with spatial and feature-based expectations, amplifying their impact on neural responses and performance. Accordingly, temporal expectations may often run through other, receptive-field-based, attentional biases. Although the study of temporal attention takes its roots in the domains of perception and action, it is likely to be important across many cognitive domains (working memory, reinforcement learning and so on) and may contribute to a better understanding of many cognitive disorders. The brain uses predictable temporal structure to anticipate and select relevant events in time. Nobre and van Ede introduce different types of this 'temporal expectation' and its neural underpinnings, and describe how temporal expectation interacts with other forms of expectation in guiding adaptive behaviour. We have come to recognize the brain as a predictive organ, anticipating attributes of the incoming sensory stimulation to guide perception and action in the service of adaptive behaviour. In the quest to understand the neural bases of the modulatory prospective signals that prioritize and select relevant events during perception, one fundamental dimension has until recently been largely overlooked: time. In this Review, we introduce the burgeoning field of temporal attention and illustrate how the brain makes use of various forms of temporal regularities in the environment to guide adaptive behaviour and influence neural processing.