Topic
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.
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TL;DR: The scenario supports the idea that the AB arises from “biased competition”, with the top–down bias being generated by parietal–frontal interactions and the competition taking place between stimulus codes in temporal cortex.
Abstract: When people monitor a visual stream of rapidly presented stimuli for two targets (T1 and T2), they often miss T2 if it falls into a time window of about half a second after T1 onset-the attentional blink (AB). We provide an overview of recent neuroscientific studies devoted to analyze the neural processes underlying the AB and their temporal dynamics. The available evidence points to an attentional network involving temporal, right-parietal and frontal cortex, and suggests that the components of this neural network interact by means of synchronization and stimulus-induced desynchronization in the beta frequency range. We set up a neurocognitive scenario describing how the AB might emerge and why it depends on the presence of masks and the other event(s) the targets are embedded in. The scenario supports the idea that the AB arises from "biased competition", with the top-down bias being generated by parietal-frontal interactions and the competition taking place between stimulus codes in temporal cortex.
99 citations
TL;DR: The results support the idea that individual processing limitations (with regard to either attentional allocation policies or the speed of global cortical integration processes) play a key role in the AB.
Abstract: The attentional blink (AB) is often attributed to resource limitations, but the nature of these resources is commonly underspecified. Recent observations rule out access to short-term memory or storage capacity as limiting factors, but operation bottlenecks are still an option. We considered the operation span of working memory (WM) as a possible factor and investigated the relationship between individual WM operation span (as measured by OSPAN), fluid intelligence (as measures by Raven's SPM), and the size of the AB. WM operation span was negatively correlated with the AB, whereas fluid intelligence was associated with higher overall accuracy but not with AB magnitude. These results support the idea that individual processing limitations (with regard to either attentional allocation policies or the speed of global cortical integration processes) play a key role in the AB.
98 citations
TL;DR: A functional hierarchy of unconscious visual processing can in principle be established and bears importantly on the search for, and the distinctions between, neural correlates of conscious and unconscious vision.
98 citations
TL;DR: Behavioural evidence is reported that β-adrenergic blockade with propranolol impairs attention independent of target valence, and increasing NE tone, using the selective NE reuptake inhibitor reboxetine, improves detection of emotional stimuli.
Abstract: Introduction Norepinephrine (NE) has a regulatory role in human attention. Objective To examine its role in emotional modulation of attention, we used an attentional blink (AB) paradigm, in the context of psychopharmacological manipulation, where targets were either emotional or neutral items. Results and discussion We report behavioural evidence that β-adrenergic blockade with propranolol impairs attention independent of target valence. Furthermore, this effect is centrally mediated as administration of the peripheral βadrenergic antagonist nadolol did not impair attention. By contrast, increasing NE tone, using the selective NE reuptake inhibitor reboxetine, improves detection of emotional stimuli. Conclusion In line with theoretical and animal models, these findings provide human behavioural evidence that the adrenergic system has a modulatory influence on selective attention that in some instances depends on item valence.
97 citations
01 Jan 2007
TL;DR: The authors show that an attentional blink occurs even in the absence of distractors, with 2 letter targets separated by a blank interval, and show that the root cause of the blink lies in the difficulty of engaging attention twice within a short period of time for 2 temporally discrete target events.
Abstract: When asked to identify 2 visual targets (T1 and T2 for the 1st and 2nd targets, respectively) embedded in a sequence of distractors, observers will often fail to identify T2 when it appears within 200-500 ms of T1--an effect called the attentional blink. Recent work shows that attention does not blink when the task is to encode a sequence of consecutive targets, suggesting that distractor interference plays a causal role in the attentional blink. Here, however, the authors show that an attentional blink occurs even in the absence of distractors, with 2 letter targets separated by a blank interval. In addition, the authors found that the impairment for identification of the 2nd of 2 targets separated by a blank interval is substantially attenuated either when the intertarget interval is filled with additional target items or when the 2nd target is precued by an additional target. These findings show that the root cause of the blink lies in the difficulty of engaging attention twice within a short period of time for 2 temporally discrete target events.
97 citations