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.

The Crannies of the Present

Abstract: In the last 20 years there has been a burgeoning of research in experimental psychology on nonconscious perception. Much of the impetus for this activity has come from Benjamin Libet’s troubling experiments on the formative interval of perception.

On the fringe of awareness: the glance-look model of attention-emotion interactions

Abstract: In previous work, we have developed a "Glance-Look" model, which has replicated a broad profile of data on the semantic Attentional Blink (AB) task and characterized how attention deployment is modulated by emotion. The model relies on a distinction between two levels of meaning: implicational and propositional, which are supported by two corresponding mental subsystems. The somatic contribution of emotional effects is modeled by an additional body-state subsystem. The interaction among these three subsystems enables attention to oscillate between them. Using this model, we have predicted the pattern of conscious perception during the AB and the changes of awareness when emotional or other task irrelevant processing occurs. We provide a specific account of the interaction between attention, emotion and consciousness. In particular, the dynamics of two modes of attending to meaning (implicational being more distributed and propositional being evaluative and specific) give rise to fringe awareness.

Isolating the Auditory Attentional Blink among Sighted and Blind Persons

Abstract: Attending to one stimulus may affect the processing of subsequent stimuli. Rapid serial visual presentation is a useful method for investigating the cognitive consequences of attending to visual stimuli. It entails the rapid (6 to 20 items-per-second) sequential computer presentation on each trial of 15 to 25 items, such as letters or digits. Participants must detect or identify one or more targets in the sequence that are distinguished by a feature, such as color. When participants attend an initial target, called Tl, their ability to perceivea subsequent target, called T2, is impaired if the intertarget interval is between 100and 450 milliseconds (ms) and Tl is masked by an immediately succeedingitem (Raymond, Shapiro, & Arnell, 1992). This is the attentional blink. In the past decade, researchers have investigated potential auditory and cross-modal auditory-visual blinks. Such investigations speak not only to the generality of the attentional blink, but to the properties of modalityspecific attentional modules (that is, attentional processes specific to a particular sensory system), on the one hand, and a general, supramodal attentional system on the other. Determining the existence of an auditory blink has proved controversial. Whereas

The effect of fatigue on the attentional blink.

Abstract: Published online: 11 July 2013(Q> Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2013It has been suggested that attention and emotional states are tightly linked, in that negative moods are associated with narrowed attentional focus, whereas positive moods are asso- ciated with broadened focus. However, recent studies on the effect of affective states, using the attentional blink deficit as a reflection of the temporary unavailability of attentional re- sources, have reported ambiguous results regarding the deploy- ment of attention in the temporal domain. In the present study, we examined whether the effect of affective state on the atten- tional blink should be interpreted in terms of valence and arousal axes or in terms of the specificity of the connection between affect and attention. We chose to use fatigue to test these alternatives because, according to the two-axis view, fatigue would not be expected to increase the attentional blink. Participants identified two targets embedded in a stream of nontargets, and for half of the participants, a state of fatigue was induced using the Trier Social Stress Test. Those in the experimental group demonstrated a greater attentional blink relative to those in the control group, who did not receive the mood manipulation. The results suggest unique links between mood states and attention during a task involving temporal selection.Studies in cognitive psychology have shown that the de- ployment of attentional resources (Kahneman, 1973; Matthews & Desmond, 1998) is determined by various external factors, such as physically (Theeuwes, 2010) and socially (West, Anderson, & Pratt, 2009) distinctive items, as well as by endogenous factors, such as intention (Hommel, 2010). Moreover, the deployment of attention can also be affected by such internal factors as motivation (Delia Libera & Chelazzi, 2006) and the current mood state (Fredrickson, 2004; Friedman & Forster, 2010), because the internal states of observers can influence executive function (Ashby, Isen, & Turken, 1999), which governs the major cognitive systems, thereby including the deployment of attention.In terms of the spatial domain, it is generally agreed that negative moods are associated with narrowed attentional focus, whereas positive moods are associated with broad- ened focus (Rowe, Hirsh, & Anderson, 2007). Therefore, in a typical Eriksen flanker task, in which observers identify a target, the flanking distractors interfered less when partici- pants were in a negative than when they were in a neutral mood (Sato, Takenaka, & Kawahara, 2012). In contrast, broadened and more distributed attention is more likely in positive than in neutral moods (Moriya & Nittono, 2011).Such effects of mood states can also be demonstrated in the temporal domain by using the attentional blink task (Raymond, Shapiro, & Arnell, 1992), in which identification of the second of two targets embedded in a rapid stream of nontargets is impaired at short intertarget lags (about 100- 300 ms). This impairment has been attributed to the unavailability of temporary attentional resources immediate- ly after processing of the first target. Recently, MacLean, Arnell, and Busseri (2010) demonstrated that higher levels of self-reported negative trait affect were associated with a greater attentional blink. These researchers also found that the magnitude of the attentional blink was negatively corre- lated with trait positive affect and that negative affect was more strongly correlated with the attentional blink than was positive affect, suggesting that negative affect is not simply the absence of positive affect, but rather appears to have its own impact. Moreover, MacLean and Arnell (2010) found that greater dispositional positive affect was associated with a smaller attentional blink, whereas greater negative trait affect was associated with a larger attentional blink (see also Rokke, Arnell, Koch, & Andrews, 2002, for a similar finding related to depression). …