## 4 Discussion  
This electrophysiological study aimed at investigating whether individuals experiencing high state depression exhibit weakened top-down attentional control processes, especially relative to feature-based selective attention. Two groups of participants with different levels of state depression, as evaluated with DASS-21 [36; 37], performed a modified version of a delayed match-to-sample task [34], which required ignoring a task-irrelevant singleton as part of a distractor array under low- and high-VWM-capacity loads. The first ERP component evaluated at the distractor array onset was the early P\({}_{\text{D}}\), which is thought to measure a process associated with proactive attentional suppression that is applied to salient distractors to prevent attentional capture [19; 25; 27], whereas the second ERP component under scrutiny was the N2 pc, which reflects the process of orienting and focusing covert attention on peripheral stimulus features and is indicative of attentional capture [13; 14; 15; 16]. Two main theories were considered in examining the ERP results of the current study. The PLT [9; 10; 32] assumes that the early selection process of task-irrelevant distractors is governed by an automatic mechanism (i.e., if perceptual capacity is exhausted in processing a large amount of relevant information, then no attentional resources for perceiving irrelevant stimuli are left). Thus, according to the PLT, in the high (vs. low)-perceptual-load condition, due to perceptual capacity exhaustion, there should be ERP evidence of automatic rejection of the distractor with the absence of both early \(\mathrm{P_{D}}\) and N2 pc components. On the contrary, according to the SSH of controlled attentional capture [18; 23; 25], in the high (vs. low)-perceptual-load condition, with the intervention of top-down attentional control mechanisms, there should be ERP evidence of a proactive suppression of task-irrelevant distractor features with an enhanced amplitude of early \(\mathrm{P_{D}}\) and the absence of N2 pc components in order to promote the performance of the current task at hand in the face of distraction. The ERP results highlight distinct patterns in early \(\mathrm{P_{D}}\) and N2 pc amplitudes between the state depression groups and under varying perceptual loads. The individuals belonging to the LSD group demonstrated a significant magnitude of early \(\mathrm{P_{D}}\) for both low- and high-VWM-capacity loads. These findings for the LSD individuals support the predictions of the SSH of controlled attention capture, revealing that salient stimuli elicit a bottom-up \"attend to me\" signal, which under some task conditions, such as when they are incongruent with the current attentional set, can be successfully suppressed (see review in [27]). Interestingly, LSD individuals exhibited an overall significantly larger early \(\mathrm{P_{D}}\) amplitude compared to HSD individuals. Crucially, there was no evidence of early \(\mathrm{P_{D}}\) for either low- or high-VWM-capacity loads in the HSD group. Overall, these findings support the main hypothesis of this study, suggesting that individuals exhibiting high levels of depressive symptoms have an impairment in the top-down mechanism of the proactive control of feature gains, a cognitive strategy that involves maintaining goal-relevant information before a task-irrelevant stimulus biases attention and perception [53]. In the current study, the reduced negativity for contralateral (vs. ipsilateral) singletons was associated with early \(\mathrm{P_{D}}\), a measure of proactive attentional distractor suppression (for a review, see [27]). However, in the experiment, the distractor array has a unilateral singleton distractor.