The attentional blink: Past, present, and future of a blind spot in perceptual awareness

Abstract

A survey of the attention literature reveals the prominence of the attentional blink (AB)-a deficit in reporting the second of two targets when presented in close temporal succession. For two decades, this robust attentional phenomenon has been a major topic in attention research because it is informative about the rate at which stimuli can be encoded into consciously accessible representations. The pace of discovery and theoretical advancement concerning the AB has increased rapidly in the past few years with emphasis on new neurophysiological evidence and computational accounts of attentional processes. In this review we extract the central questions and the main lessons learnt from the past, and subsequently provide important directions for future research.

Supplementation of gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) affects temporal, but not spatial visual attention

“…The currently observed role of GABA in temporal attention fits with the recent observation of a negative relationship between GABA levels in the right prefrontal cortex and the size of the AB (Kihara, Kondo, & Kawahara, 2016). It also fits with the hypothesis that excessive attention directed to T1 identification, possibly due to lower levels of inhibition, leads to a larger AB (Martens & Wyble, 2010). When this overinvestment in target identification is diminished by increased inhibition due to higher GABA levels, attentional performance might improve, and this prediction is supported by our data.…”

“…In general, processing the first target (T1) is thought to undermine the proper processing of the second target (T2). The idea of limited cognitive resources has been supported by many previous studies (for a review, see Martens & Wyble, 2010).…”

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.…”

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).…”