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 development of attentional orienting during the school‐age years

Abstract: This study was designed to assess the development of spatial attentional orienting during the school-age years. To that end, we used a cost-benefit attentional cueing task with short (100 ms) and long (800 ms) cue-to-target intervals to examine attentional processing independent of motor skills and perceptual processing in 200 7‐17-year-olds and 40 adults. We found that orienting attention, disengaging attention and visual processing in an unattended location, were all progressively more accurate and faster with increasing age. Our data thus suggest that the efficiency of attentional orienting improves in an age-related manner throughout the school-age years.

Cognitive control and attentional selection in adolescents with ADHD versus ADD

Abstract: An important research question is whether Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is related to early- or late-stage attentional control mechanisms and whether this differentiates a nonhyperactive subtype (ADD). This question was addressed in a sample of 145 ADD/ADHD and typically developing comparison adolescents (aged 13-17). Attentional blink and antisaccade tasks were used to assay early- and late-stage control, respectively. ADD was defined using normative cutoffs to ensure low activity level in children who otherwise met full criteria for ADHD. The ADD group had an attenuated attentional blink versus controls and ADHD-combined. The effect was not produced using DSM--IV definition of ADHD-primarily inattentive type or DSM symptom counts. ADHD-combined showed greater weakness in response inhibition, as manifest in the antisaccade task. Combining tasks yielded an interaction differentiating group performance on the two tasks.

Transient suppression of processing during rapid serial visual presentation: Acquired distinctiveness of probes modulates the attentional blink.

Abstract: The attentional blink is revealed in studies of rapid serial visual processing, in which observers view a stream of letters presented sequentially at the same location in a visual display. Reporting the identity of a specially marked letter (the target) amidst distractors causes a transient loss of accuracy for detection of another prespecified symbol (the probe). In two experiments, observers viewed lists of letters, identified a randomly selected letter as a target, and detected the presence of a probe from a different category (a digit or a Greek letter). After several days of training, probe detection following a target had improved markedly. Posttarget probe detection was again impaired when the distractor set included members of the probe set. These results are compatible with an explanation of the attentional blink as an act of suppression aimed at the current set of distractors, but additional mechanisms are needed to account for the effects of training.

Paying Attention to Meaning

Abstract: Several paradigms show that responses to one event compromise responses to a second event for around 500 ms. Such effects are generally attributed to attentional capacity limitations associated with processing information in the first event. In a task in which targets could be distinguished only by their meaning, we varied the semantic relationship between distractors and targets following at different lags. Semantic relatedness alone produced a classic attentional blink. We conclude by discussing how attention theory might best accommodate these new effects.

The attentional blink reveals serial working memory encoding: Evidence from virtual and human event-related potentials

Abstract: Observers often miss a second target (T2) if it follows an identified first target item (T1) within half a second in rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP), a finding termed the attentional blink. If two targets are presented in immediate succession, however, accuracy is excellent (Lag 1 sparing). The resource sharing hypothesis proposes a dynamic distribution of resources over a time span of up to 600 msec during the attentional blink. In contrast, the ST2 model argues that working memory encoding is serial during the attentional blink and that, due to joint consolidation, Lag 1 is the only case where resources are shared. Experiment 1 investigates the P3 ERP component evoked by targets in RSVP. The results suggest that, in this context, P3 amplitude is an indication of bottom-up strength rather than a measure of cognitive resource allocation. Experiment 2, employing a two-target paradigm, suggests that T1 consolidation is not affected by the presentation of T2 during the attentional blink. However, if targets are presented in immediate succession (Lag 1 sparing), they are jointly encoded into working memory. We use the ST2 model's neural network implementation, which replicates a range of behavioral results related to the attentional blink, to generate "virtual ERPs" by summing across activation traces. We compare virtual to human ERPs and show how the results suggest a serial nature of working memory encoding as implied by the ST2 model.