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.

Attentional blink suppresses both stimulus-driven and representation-driven cross-modal spread of attention.

Abstract: Previous studies have shown that visual attention effect can spread to the task-irrelevant auditory modality automatically through either the stimulus-driven binding process or the representation-driven priming process. Using an attentional blink paradigm, the present study investigated whether the long-latency stimulus-driven and representation-driven cross-modal spread of attention would be inhibited or facilitated when the attentional resources operating at the post-perceptual stage of processing are inadequate, whereas ensuring all visual stimuli were spatially attended and the representations of visual target object categories were activated, which were previously thought to be the only endogenous prerequisites for triggering cross-modal spread of attention. The results demonstrated that both types of attentional spreading were completely suppressed during the attentional blink interval but were highly prominent outside the attentional blink interval, with the stimulus-driven process being independent of, whereas the representation-driven process being dependent on, audiovisual semantic congruency. These findings provide the first evidence that the occurrences of both stimulus-driven and representation-driven spread of attention are contingent on the amount of post-perceptual attentional resources responsible for the late consolidation processing of visual stimuli, whereas the early detection of visual stimuli and the top-down activation of the visual representations are not the sole endogenous prerequisites for triggering any types of cross-modal attentional spreading.

Sexual distractors boost younger and older adults' visual search RSVP performance

Abstract: Do sexual words have high attentional priority? How does the ability to ignore sexual distractors evolve with age? To answer these questions, two experiments using Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) were conducted. Experiment 1 showed that both younger and older participants were better at identifying a target (the name of a colour) when it was preceded by 336 ms by a sexual word rather than by a musical word. Strikingly, the sexual-word advantage was more pronounced for older adults than for younger adults. Experiment 2 showed that introducing a variable delay between the distractor and the target eliminated the sexual-word advantage. This finding suggests that the sexual-word advantage found in Experiment 1 was due to learning to utilize the sexual word as a temporal cue with a fixed duration between the distractor and the target. Contrary to previous research [Arnell et al., 2007, Emotion, 7, 465), neither experiment showed that sexual words produce an attentional blink.

The temporal spotlight of attention : computational and electrophysiological explorations

Abstract: The study of attention aims to understand how the visual system focuses its resources on salient targets presented amongst competing distractors. In a continuously changing environment, temporal attention must pick out targets presented in between spatially coincident distractors that are offset in time. Cognitive theories have proposed that this task is mediated by a temporal spotlight of attention. This thesis combines evidence from behaviour and electrophysiology (EEG) with theoretical insights from neural network modelling to investigate the interplay between this spotlight and conscious perception. The experiments described in this thesis investigate the electrophysiology of temporal visual perception using the Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) paradigm. Building upon behavioural research, we use EEG to investigate the influence of target discriminability, the Attentional Blink (AB) and feature integration on the temporal dynamics of visual perception. These findings characterise the influence of pre-attentional processes on attentional deployment, and the subsequent influence of this deployment on perception and behaviour. In addition, they provide the basis for a complementary computational elucidation. The theoretical component of this thesis is based on the ST2 neural network model. The notion of Transient Attentional Enhancement (TAE) embodied therein is the computational equivalent of the temporal spotlight. Its function is evaluated within the ST2 model and in relation to other modelling approaches. In addition, human ERP (Event-Related Potential) data from the experiments are compared with the models equivalent activation traces, termed Virtual ERPs. This combination of theory and experiment broadens our understanding of temporal visual perception, and in conjunction, highlights the role of neural modelling in informing EEG research. xiii