BALTIMORE — Researchers at Johns Hopkins University identified specific brainstem neurons that control selective spatial attention by suppressing distractions. The study, conducted on mice, found that these neurons exist in a brainstem region present across all vertebrates, including humans, birds, and fish. The findings were published in the journal Nature Communications on June 22, 2026.

During the study, mice performed a task where they focused on visual information directly ahead on a screen while ignoring distracting information to the side. The mice earned rewards for touching the screen at the location indicated by the target information. Researchers temporarily disabled the identified brainstem neurons in the mice, which affected their performance in the task.

Shreesh Mysore, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University and senior author of the study, said the findings relate to attention disorders. "A hallmark of ADHD is that even faint distractors draw attention away-and that's exactly what we see here when these neurons are silenced," Mysore said. "But the very next day, when the neurons are turned back on, the same animal can ignore distractors again, even very strong ones."

The researchers also conducted additional tests to ensure that the changes in the mice's performance were not due to impairments in motor movements or vision. "The only thing impaired was their ability to take the competing pieces of information, compare them, and pay attention to the location with the most important information," Mysore said. The attention circuit identified in the study consists of inhibitory neurons.

Ninad Kothari, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University and lead author, described the effect of disabling the neurons. "When we inactivate these neurons, the mice become hyper distractable," Kothari said. He added that earlier studies on birds, frogs, and turtles led to the investigation of these neurons in mammals. "If we really go back in evolution, for hundreds of millions of years, birds have had this ability, fish have had this ability. And they do not typically have a highly developed prefrontal cortex, so how does the brain solve this problem? We were able to identify an evolutionarily old region in the brainstem which affords this ability."

The research was federally funded. Researchers plan to measure the activity of these neurons in people with conditions such as Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and autism, where selective spatial attention is affected. It was previously thought that attention primarily originated from the prefrontal cortex, which is not highly developed in many vertebrates.