The attentional blink unveils the interplay between conscious perception, spatial attention and working memory encoding

Abstract

The attentional blink refers to the deficit in reporting the second of 2 targets (T2), when it appears within 600ms after the first (T1). We examined which aspect of T1 processing triggers the AB. In three experiments, we disentangled the roles of spatial attention, conscious perception and working memory (WM) in causing the blink. We show that while allocating spatial attention to T1 is neither necessary nor sufficient for eliciting a blink, consciously perceiving it is necessary but not sufficient. When T1 was task irrelevant, consciously perceiving it triggered a blink only when it matched the attentional set for T2. We conclude that consciously perceiving a task-relevant event causes the blink, possibly because it triggers encoding of this event into WM. We discuss the implications of these findings for the relationship between spatial attention, conscious perception and WM, as well as for the distinction between access and phenomenal consciousness.