Individual strategies for ignoring irrelevant information are reflected in distinct neural signatures during temporal attention.

Attentional functions enable the nervous system to regulate incoming information, selecting what is behaviorally relevant while filtering out distractions. To investigate attentional control in rats, we developed a paradigm in which animals are required to ignore an irrelevant tactile stimulus (a vibration) and categorize the relevant one as weak or strong. Stimuli were separated in time but delivered to the same set of vibrissae, making this a temporal rather than spatial attention task. In the first task version, the irrelevant stimulus was presented first and the relevant second. Across animals, we observed substantial variability in how this task was learned and performed, consistent wit