Selective attentionallows to effectively process large amounts of visual input by selecting relevant information and filteringout irrelevant one. Whereas most current models of visual attention emphasise the role of prioritisation of items that are essential for our current tasks and goals, an equally important facet of adaptive behaviour is the suppression of competing, yet irrelevant,stimuli. The goal of the following set of experiments is to better characterise the inhibitory mechanisms of selective visual attention by employing behavioural and event-related brain potentials methods. The first empirical chapter (Chapter II) presents a behavioural investigation examining how inhibition can be utilised to realign covert and overt attentional systems. The second empirical chapter (Chapter III), uses the behavioural approach to probe the sensitivity of inhibition to top-down processes such as statistical probabilitiesof the target location. Chapter IV, in turn, integrates behavioural and electrophysiological methods to elucidate theneural basis ofmodulatory effects of objects presence on the spatiotemporal distribution of inhibition. Finally, in Chapter V this approach is further usedto examine the effects of the object complexity on inhibitory distribution. Overall, the findings indicate that inhibition actsto realign covert and overt attention by biasing reorienting towardsthe (central) fixation point and thatitis relatively resistant to top-down modulations such as statistical priors of target location. Furthermore, stronger inhibitory signal to locations that are occupied by objects isimplemented by a dynamic neural process encompassing perceptual and decision-relatedstagesof target processing. However, object complexity appearsnotto affect inhibition. In sum, results from this thesis advocatethe critical role of inhibition in visual attention and have important implications for cognitive fields, whenever selecting relevant items is required