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.

Neural dynamics of the attentional blink revealed by encoding orientation selectivity during rapid visual presentation

Abstract: The human brain is inherently limited in the information it can make consciously accessible. When people monitor a rapid stream of visual items for two targets, they typically fail to see the second target if it occurs within 200-500 ms of the first, a phenomenon called the attentional blink (AB). The neural basis for the AB is poorly understood, partly because conventional neuroimaging techniques cannot resolve visual events displayed close together in time. Here we introduce an approach that characterises the precise effect of the AB on behaviour and neural activity. We employ multivariate encoding analyses to extract feature-selective information carried by randomly-oriented gratings. We show that feature selectivity is enhanced for correctly reported targets and suppressed when the same items are missed, whereas irrelevant distractor items are unaffected. The findings suggest that the AB involves both short- and long-range neural interactions between visual representations competing for access to consciousness.

Attentional blink reflex modulation in a continuous performance task is modality specific

Abstract: Four experiments investigated the attentional modulation of acoustic blinks during continuous spatial tracking tasks. Experiment 1 found blink magnitude inhibition in a visual tracking task. Experiment 2 replicated this finding and also found blink latency slowing. Experiment 3 varied the difficulty of the task and found larger blink inhibition in the easy condition. Blink latency slowing did not differ and was significant at both difficulty levels. Experiment 4 employed less difficult visual and acoustic tracking tasks at two levels of task load. Blink magnitude inhibition during the visual and facilitation during the acoustic task was significant during high load in both modality groups. Blink latency was slowed in all visual task conditions and shortened in the difficult acoustic task. These results indicate that attentional blink modulation in a continuous spatial tracking task is modality specific.

Quick Minds Slowed Down: Effects of Rotation and Stimulus Category on the Attentional Blink

Abstract: Background: Most people show a remarkable deficit to report the second of two targets when presented in close temporal succession, reflecting an attentional restriction known as the 'attentional blink' (AB). However, there are large individual differences in the magnitude of the effect, with some people showing no such attentional restrictions. Methodology/Principal Findings: Here we present behavioral and electrophysiological evidence suggesting that these 'non-blinkers' can use alphanumeric category information to select targets at an early processing stage. When such information was unavailable and target selection could only be based on information that is processed relatively late (rotation), even non-blinkers show a substantial AB. Electrophysiologically, in non-blinkers this resulted in enhanced distractor-related prefrontal brain activity, as well as delayed target-related occipito-parietal activity (P3). Conclusion/Significance: These findings shed new light on possible strategic mechanisms that may underlie individual differences in AB magnitude and provide intriguing clues as to how temporal restrictions as reflected in the AB can be overcome.

The effects of perceptual load on semantic processing under inattention

Abstract: Inattentional blindness refers to a failure to consciously detect an irrelevant object that appears without any expectation when attention is engaged with another task. The perceptual load theory predicts that task-irrelevant stimuli will reach awareness only when the primary task is of low load, which allows processing resources to spill over to processing task-irrelevant stimuli as well. We studied whether perceptual load has an effect on inattentional blindness for a task-irrelevant stimulus whose meaning is or is not relevant to the attentional goals of the observer. In the critical trial, a word appeared without any expectation in the center of a display of attended pictures. The results showed that, under both high and low load, unexpected words belonging to the attended semantic category were detected more often than semantically unrelated words. These results imply that task-irrelevant stimuli, whose meanings are relevant to the observer’s task, enter awareness irrespective of perceptual load.

Objects and Events in the Attentional Blink

Abstract: When two visual targets, T1 and T2, are presented in rapid succession, detection or identification of T2 is almost universally de- graded by the requirement to attend to T1 (the attentional blink , or AB). One interesting exception occurs when T1 is a brief gap in a continu- ous letter stream and the task is to discriminate its duration. One hy- pothesized explanation for this exception is that an AB is triggered only by attention to a patterned object. The results reported here eliminate this hypothesis. Duration judgments produced no AB whether the judged duration concerned a short gap in the letter stream (Experiment 1) or a letter presented for slightly longer than others (Experiment 2). When iden- tification of an identical longer letter T1 was required (Experiment 3), rather than a duration judgment, the AB was reestablished. Direct percep- tual judgments of letter streams with gaps embedded showed that whereas brief gaps result in the percept of a single, briefly hesitating stream, longer gaps result in the percept of two separate streams with a sepa- rating pause. Correspondingly, an AB was produced in Experiment 4, when participants were required to judge the duration of longer T1 gaps. We propose that, like spatially separated objects, temporal events are parsed into discrete, hierarchically organized events. An AB is trig- gered only when a new attended event is defined, either when a long pause creates a new perceived stream (Experiment 4) or when atten- tion shifts from the stream to the letter level (Experiment 3). The rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) attentional blink (AB) paradigm is a well-established means of investigating the temporal limi- tations of visual selective attention (Broadbent & Broadbent, 1987; Ray- mond, Shapiro, & Arnell, 1992; Shapiro, Raymond, & Arnell, 1994). In the standard visual AB paradigm, stimuli are presented individually, at fixation, at a rate of 6 to 20 items/s (Shapiro et al., 1994). Embedded within each stream of rapidly presented stimuli are two targets (T1 and T2) that are differentiated from nontarget distractors in terms of cer- tain visual attributes (e.g., color, duration, identity). For example, the T1 task may require participants to identify a white letter within a stream of nontarget black letters. The T2 task may be to detect a black letter X (differentiated by identity) that is presented in only 50% of trials. In the standard AB paradigm, it is customary to compare performance when both targets are reported ( dual-target condition) with performance when only the second target is reported ( single-target condition). Whereas these conditions are equivalent in terms of visual information, they dif- fer in terms of what the participant is required to report and thus what must be attended (Raymond et al., 1992). The amount of interference caused by attending to T1 can then be measured by contrasting T2 per- formance in the two conditions. The critical manipulation necessary to reveal the AB is the tempo- ral position of T2 relative to T1 in the RSVP stream. T2 is presented at a range of serial positions (stimulus onset asynchrony, or SOA, usu-