Attentional blink

About: Attentional blink is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 1346 publications have been published within this topic receiving 53064 citations. The topic is also known as: Attentional blinks.

Are spatial selection and identity extraction separable when attention is controlled endogenously

Abstract: Visual search for a target involves two processes: spatial selection and identity extraction. Ghorashi, Enns, and Di Lollo (2008) found these processes to be independent and surmised that they were carried out along distinct visual pathways: dorsal and ventral, respectively. The two experiments that are described in the present article evaluated this hypothesis. Attentional-blink methodology was combined with voluntary spatial cuing in a visual search task: Intertarget lag was used to manipulate identity extraction; predictive cues were used to signal target locations. Central digit cues in Experiment 1 required participants to identify digits before voluntarily directing attention to a corresponding location, whereas flashed dots in Experiment 2 (indicating an opposite location) required attentional redeployment without prior cue identification. Consistent with the dual-pathway hypothesis, cuing was impaired only when the first target and the number cue competed for ventral-pathway mechanisms. Collectively, the results support the dual-pathway account of the separability of spatial selection and identity extraction.

A quick mind with letters can be a slow mind with natural scenes: individual differences in attentional selection.

Abstract: Background: Most people show a remarkable deficit in reporting the second of two targets (T2) when presented 200– 500 ms after the first (T1), reflecting an ‘attentional blink’ (AB). However, there are large individual differences in the magnitude of the effect, with some people, referred to as ‘non-blinkers’, showing no such attentional restrictions. Methodology/Principal Findings: Here we replicate these individual differences in a task requiring identification of two letters amongst digits, and show that the observed differences in T2 performance cannot be attributed to individual differences in T1 performance. In a second experiment, the generality of the non-blinkers’ superior performance was tested using a task containing novel pictures rather than alphanumeric stimuli. A substantial AB was obtained in non-blinkers that was equivalent to that of ‘blinkers’. Conclusion/Significance: The results suggest that non-blinkers employ an efficient target selection strategy that relies on well-learned alphabetic and numeric category sets.

Effects of clonidine and scopolamine on multiple target detection in rapid serial visual presentation.

Abstract: Rationale The specific role of neuromodulator systems in regulating rapid fluctuations of attention is still poorly understood.

The functional architecture of divided visual attention.

Abstract: When we identify a visual object such as a word or letter our ability to detect a second object is impaired if it appears within 500 ms of the first. This outcome has been named the 'attentional blink' (AB) and has been the topic of numerous research reports since 1992 when the first AB paper was published. During the first decade of research on this topic, the focus has been on 'behavioural' approaches to understanding the AB phenomenon, with manipulations made on stimulus parameters (e.g. type and spatial distribution), nature of the stimuli (uni-modal or cross-modal) and importantly the role of masking. More recently, researchers have begun to focus on neurophysiological underpinnings of the AB studying patients with focal lesions and using approaches such as ERP, TMS, fMRI and MEG. My chapter presents the results of a number of such neurophysiological techniques, suggesting that localisation, in combination with activation and synchronisation methods have begun to unravel a dynamic temporo-parietal frontal network of structures involved in the AB.

Mechanisms of visual threat detection in specific phobia

Abstract: People with anxiety or stress-related disorders attend differently to threat-relevant compared with non-threat stimuli, yet the temporal mechanisms of differential allocation of attention are not well understood. We investigated two independent mechanisms of temporal processing of visual threat by comparing spider-phobic and non-fearful participants using a rapid serial visual presentation task. Consistent with prior literature, spider phobics, but not non-fearful controls, displayed threat-specific facilitated detection of spider stimuli relative to negative stimuli and neutral stimuli. Further, signal detection analyses revealed that facilitated threat detection in spider-phobic participants was driven by greater sensitivity to threat stimulus features and a trend towards a lower threshold for detecting spider stimuli. However, phobic participants did not display reliably slowed temporal disengagement from threat-relevant stimuli. These findings advance our understanding of threat feature processing that might contribute to the onset and maintenance of symptoms in specific phobia and disorders that involve visual threat information more generally.