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.

Blinking and the Brain: Pathways and Pathology

Abstract: textA blink is a rapid bilateral eyelid closure and co-occurring eye movement. The eyes rotate down towards the tip of the nose and back up again. Seemingly, this generally unnoticed often repeated action is not very spectacular. However, if not for the occasional blink we would all be blind. A blink is an interesting phenomenon worth investigating. Through its role as a protective barrier for the eye and as a distributor of the eye’s tearfi lm, blinking is a necessity for our well-being but is also an important tool for neuroscience research and physicians. It is an extremely useful model to study motor performance, motor control, synaptic plasticity and is an excellent physiological instrument for the assessment of internal networks and nuclei [Nishimura, T. and Mori, K, 1996]. The blink rate, refl ex blink characteristics and learned blinks are the three main parameters that can be studied to this end. The blink rate is the frequency with which spontaneous blinks occur and can give information about the dopaminergic system [Karson 1988] and might even be usable as a measure of fatigue [Stern et al. 1994]. The refl ex blink is a rapid involuntary response evoked by external stimulation of the eye or eyelid. It has a protective function and is for instance used in research and physiological tests that use the blink to provide important information on the integrity of afferent and efferent pathways. However, important gaps remain in the knowledge of pathways underlying blinking, and aberrations in pathways or compensatory mechanisms are not fully understood. The learned blink is acquired during eyeblink or eyelid conditioning in which an involuntary blink-evoking stimulus is repeatedly combined with a neutral stimulus. After training the neutral stimulus can evoke the learned blink.

Cannot avert the eyes: reduced attentional blink toward others' emotional expressions in empathic people.

Abstract: Empathy is one of the core components of social interaction. Although current models of empathy emphasize the role of attention, few studies have directly examined the relationship between attentional processes and individual differences in empathy. This study hypothesized that empathic people would process emotional expressions more efficiently and automatically compared to less empathic people. Crucially, such a processing advantage should be present only for faces of others compared to one's own face. To test this hypothesis, 100 healthy participants varying in their self-reported empathy levels underwent an attentional blink task that tested preferential attentional processing. Results showed a diminished attentional blink effect for sad faces of others in the high-empathy group. Additionally, performance differences in the task were related to both trait empathy and daily prosocial behavior. Overall, our results show that emotional stimuli preferentially capture the attention of empathic people, leading to automatic processing.

Temporal cuing modulates alpha oscillations during auditory attentional blink.

Abstract: Attentional blink (AB) refers to the phenomenon whereby the correct identification of a visual or auditory target impairs processing of a subsequent probe. Although it has been shown that knowing in advance, when the probe would be presented, reduces the attentional blink and increases the amplitude of event-related potential (ERP) elicited by the probe, the neural mechanism by which attention mitigates the AB remains unclear. Here, we used time-frequency analysis to further explore the mechanism of the auditory attentional blink. Participants were presented a series of rapid auditory stimuli and asked to indicate whether a target and a probe were present in the sequence. In half of the trials, participants were cued to the probe position relative to the target ('Early' or 'Late'). Probe detection and ERP amplitude elicited by the probe decreased when the probe was presented shortly after the target compared to when it was presented later after the target. Importantly, the behavioral and ERP correlates of probe discrimination significantly improved when the 'Early' cue was presented. The improvement in processing the probe in the cued condition was accompanied by the decrease in alpha activity (8-13 Hz) after the time when the probe was expected; suggesting that successfully directing attention to time window where the probe would likely occur reduces the processing resources needed to suppress distractors. This in turn freed up available processing resources for the target and probe at the short-term consolidation stage, which ultimately reduced the auditory attentional blink.

Hemispheric Asymmetry in the Auditory Facilitation Effect in Dual-Stream Rapid Serial Visual Presentation Tasks

Abstract: Even though auditory stimuli do not directly convey information related to visual stimuli, they often improve visual detection and identification performance. Auditory stimuli often alter visual perception depending on the reliability of the sensory input, with visual and auditory information reciprocally compensating for ambiguity in the other sensory domain. Perceptual processing is characterized by hemispheric asymmetry. While the left hemisphere is more involved in linguistic processing, the right hemisphere dominates spatial processing. In this context, we hypothesized that an auditory facilitation effect in the right visual field for the target identification task, and a similar effect would be observed in the left visual field for the target localization task. In the present study, we conducted target identification and localization tasks using a dual-stream rapid serial visual presentation. When two targets are embedded in a rapid serial visual presentation stream, the target detection or discrimination performance for the second target is generally lower than for the first target; this deficit is well known as attentional blink. Our results indicate that auditory stimuli improved target identification performance for the second target within the stream when visual stimuli were presented in the right, but not the left visual field. In contrast, auditory stimuli improved second target localization performance when visual stimuli were presented in the left visual field. An auditory facilitation effect was observed in perceptual processing, depending on the hemispheric specialization. Our results demonstrate a dissociation between the lateral visual hemifield in which a stimulus is projected and the kind of visual judgment that may benefit from the presentation of an auditory cue.