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.

Emotion modulation of visual attention: Categorical and temporal characteristics.

Abstract: Background: Experimental research has shown that emotional stimuli can either enhance or impair attentional performance. However, the relative effects of specific emotional stimuli and the specific time course of these differential effects are unclear. Methodology/Principal Findings: In the present study, participants (n=50) searched for a single target within a rapid serial visual presentation of images. Irrelevant fear, disgust, erotic or neutral images preceded the target by two, four, six, or eight items. At lag 2, erotic images induced the greatest deficits in subsequent target processing compared to other images, consistent with a large emotional attentional blink. Fear and disgust images also produced a larger attentional blinks at lag 2 than neutral images. Erotic, fear, and disgust images continued to induce greater deficits than neutral images at lag 4 and 6. However, target processing deficits induced by erotic, fear, and disgust images at intermediate lags (lag 4 and 6) did not consistently differ from each other. In contrast to performance at lag 2, 4, and 6, enhancement in target processing for emotional stimuli was observed in comparison to neutral stimuli at lag 8. Conclusions/Significance: These findings suggest that task-irrelevant emotion information, particularly erotica, impairs intentional allocation of attention at early temporal stages, but at later temporal stages, emotional stimuli can have an enhancing effect on directed attention. These data suggest that the effects of emotional stimuli on attention can be both positive and negative depending upon temporal factors.

The Attentional Blink Reveals the Probabilistic Nature of Discrete Conscious Perception

Abstract: Attention and awareness are two tightly coupled processes that have been the subject of the same enduring debate: Are they allocated in a discrete or in a graded fashion? Using the attentional blink paradigm and mixture-modeling analysis, we show that awareness arises at central stages of information processing in an all-or-none manner. Manipulating the temporal delay between two targets affected subjects' likelihood of consciously perceiving the second target, but did not affect the precision of its representation. Furthermore, these results held across stimulus categories and paradigms, and they were dependent on attention having been allocated to the first target. The findings distinguish the fundamental contributions of attention and awareness at central stages of visual cognition: Conscious perception emerges in a quantal manner, with attention serving to modulate the probability that representations reach awareness.

Attention “Blinks” Differently for Plants and Animals

Abstract: Plants, to many, are simply not as interesting as animals. Students typically prefer to study animals rather than plants and recall plants more poorly, and plants are underrepresented in the classroom. The observed paucity of interest for plants has been described as plant blindness, a term that is meant to encapsulate both the tendency to neglect plants in the environment and the lack of appreciation for plants’ functional roles. While the term plant blindness suggests a perceptual or attentional component to plant neglect, few studies have examined whether there are real differences in how plants and animals are perceived. Here, we use an established paradigm in visual cognition, the “attentional blink,” to compare the extent to which images of plants and animals capture attentional resources. We find that participants are better able to detect animals than plants in rapid image sequences and that visual attention has a different refractory period when a plant has been detected. These results suggest there are fundamental differences in how the visual system processes plants that may contribute to plant blindness. We discuss how perceptual and physiological constraints on visual processing may suggest useful strategies for characterizing and overcoming zoocentrism.