The attentional blink: A review of data and theory

Abstract

AND RENt MAROISVanderbilt University. Nashville, Tennessee Under conditions of rapid serial visual presentation, subjects display a reduced ability to report the second of two targets (Target 2; T2) in a stream of distractors if it appears within 200-500 msec of Target I (Tl). This effect, known as the attentional blink (AB), has been central in characterizing the limits of humans' ability to consciously perceive stimuli distributed across time. Here, we review theoretical accounts of the AB and examine how they explain key f"mdings in the literature. We conclude that the AB arises from attentional demands ofTl for selection, working memory encoding, episodic registration, and response selection, which prevents this high-level central resource from being applied to T2 at short T 1-T2 lags. TI processing also transiently impairs the redeployment of these attentional resources to subsequent targets and the inhibition of distractors that appear in close temporal proximity to T2. Although these f"mdings are consistent with a multifactorial account of the AB, they can also be largely explained by assuming that the activation of these multiple processes depends on a common capacity-limited attentional process for selecting behaviorally relevant events presented among temporally distributed distractors. Thus, at its core, the attentional blink may ultimately reveal the temporal limits of the deployment of selective attention.Our visual environment constantly changes across the dimensions of both time and space. Within the ftrst few hundred milliseconds of viewing a scene, the visual system is bombarded with much more sensory information than it is able to process up to awareness. To overcome this limitation, humans are equipped with fIlters at a number of different levels of information processing. For example, high-resolution vision is restricted to the fovea, with acuity drastically reduced at the periphery. Such front-end mechanisms reduce the initial input; however, they still leave the visual system with an overwhelming amount of information to analyze. To meet this challenge, the human attentionaI system prioritizes salient stimuli (targets) that are to undergo extended processing and discards stimuli that are less relevant for behavior after only limited analysis (Broad-

Automaticity and cognitive control in the learned predictiveness effect.

“…It is now well established that the AB is a robust effect observed across a range of stimuli, including alphanumeric characters (Chun & Potter, 1995;Raymond, Shapiro, & Arnell, 1992), words (Barnard et al, 2004;Luck, Vogel, & Shapiro, 1996), objects (Harris, Benito, & Dux, 2010;, and faces (de Jong, Koster, van Wees, & Martens, 2009;Fox, Russo, & Georgiou, 2005), suggesting that the phenomenon reflects a fairly central characteristic of limited perceptual awareness (Dux & Marois, 2009;Martens & Wyble, 2010). There is now strong evidence consistent with the proposal that this limitation occurs at a postperceptual stage of stimulus processing.…”

Mental fatigue and impaired cognitive function after an acquired brain injury

“…Two similar neuropsychological test and retest batteries were used for the assessment (Figure 1). Both test batteries included a) Digit Symbol Coding (DSC, WASI‐IV) (Wechsler, 2010), b) Attentional Blink test (AB) (Slagter et al., 2007; Dux & Marois, 2009), and c) a computerized test combining divided attention and working memory simultaneously (SAWM) (Johansson & Rönnbäck, 2015). Test battery I also included Digit Span (DS) and Symbol search (SS)(WAIS‐IV) (Wechsler, 2010) and test battery II included D‐KEFS Color Word (CW) (Delis, Kaplan, & Kramer, 2001).…”

Beyond a mask and against the bottleneck: Retroactive dual-task interference during working memory consolidation of a masked visual target.

“…A second set of studies that present a markedly different pattern of results than that seen in the current study can be found in studies in which participants were asked to report two target stimuli (e.g., letters) that were embedded in a rapid sequence of distractors (e.g., digits). To wit, the typical pattern of results obtained in these experiments is that performance on the second target suffers a pronounced attentional blink effect, whereas performance on the first target is relatively accurate, unless it is followed within less than about 100 ms by the second target (see Figure 6; Dux & Marois, 2009;Martens & Wyble, 2010). In accounting for this pattern of results, it is often assumed that the attentional blink effect for the second target reflects an interference effect that is caused by the consolidation of the first target, with one proposal being that the consolidation of the first target results in an attentional blink because it involves a slow and immutable processing bottleneck (e.g., Chun & Potter, 1995;Jolicoeur & Dell'Acqua, 1998;Shih, 2008), whereas another proposes that the consolidation of the first target results in an attentional blink because it leads to a momentary lack of attention for newly encountered stimuli (e.g., Bowman & Wyble, 2007;Wyble et al, 2009Wyble et al, , 2011; see also Taatgen et al, 2009).…”

“…To be precise, there have been several previous studies that combined a memory task with an ensuing speeded 2-AFC task, and the results of these studies typically show a pronounced psychological refractory period effect for the 2-AFC task and little to no retroactive interference for the memory task (Arnell & Duncan, 2002;Arnell et al, 2004;Jolicoeur & Dell'Acqua, 1998Koch & Rumiati, 2006;Ruthruff & Pashler, 2001;Stevanovski & Jolicoeur, 2007Tombu et al, 2011). Likewise, research on the attentional blink has yielded hundreds of studies that show a severe attentional blink deficit for recall of the second target, whereas recall of the first target is typically highly accurate (Dux & Marois, 2009;Martens & Wyble, 2010), although in some conditions, recall of the first target does show a slight impairment when the second target follows within 100 ms or less (e.g., Bowman & Wyble, 2007;Chun & Potter, 1995;see also Bachmann & Hommuk, 2005;Potter, Staub, & O'Connor, 2002). Last, the current findings can also be contrasted to those obtained in studies that examined whether the retention of information in working memory can be interfered with by means of a distractor stimulus or a second task, as the pattern of results obtained in these studies also differs in interesting regards from that observed in the current experiments.…”