Attentional Blink

I AM JUST BUZZING LIKE A KID  -  HERE WE HAVE DETAILED PHOTOS OF MATTER GOING FROM 3D TO 2D.  INTERESTINGLY DEMATERIALIZATION SEEMS TO SKIP A STEP AS IT MAKES THE QUANTUM SHIFT FROM MATTER TO IT’S COHERENT IMAGE.
EVERYTHING STARTS AS A SEED / IDEA / IMAGE IN CHAOTIC DARKNESS.

When a rapid succession of auditory stimuli is listened to, processing of the second of two successive targets among fillers is often impaired, a phenomenon known as theattentional blink (AB). Three experiments were conducted to examine the role of filler items in modulating the size of the auditory AB, using a two-alternative forced choice discrimination paradigm. In the first experiment, dual-stream presentations in which low- and high-pitch items were separated by six semitones were tested. A transient deficit in reporting the probe was observed in the presence of fillers that was greater when fillers were in the same stream as the probe. In the absence of a filler, there was a residual deficit, but this was not related to the time lag between the target and the probe. In the second and third experiments, in which single-stream presentations were used, a typical AB was found in the presence of homogeneous fillers, but heterogeneous fillers tended to produce a greater deficit. In the absence of a filler, there was little or no evidence of a blink. The pattern of results suggests that other attentional and perceptual factors contribute to the blink.

The attentional blink task involves rapid serial presentation of visual stimuli, two of which the participants have to report. The usual finding is that participants are impaired at reporting the second target if it appears in close temporal proximity to the first target. Previous research has shown that the effect is stronger in bilinguals than monolinguals. We investigated whether the difference between monolinguals and proficient bilinguals can be extended to bilinguals of different proficiency levels. Therefore, we replicated the paradigm in a large sample of Hindi-English bilinguals with different proficiency levels of English, as measured with a validated vocabulary test. We additionally measured the participants' intelligence with the raven progressive matrices. We found that the size of the attentional blink effect correlates with the degree of second language proficiency and not with the degree of intelligence. This indicates that research on executive control functions...

Emotional stimuli (e.g., negative facial expressions) enjoy prioritized memory access when task relevant, consistent with their ability to capture attention. Whether emotional expression also impacts on memory access when task-irrelevant is important for arbitrating between feature-based and object-based attentional capture. Here, the authors address this question in 3 experiments using an attentional blink task with face photographs as first and second target (T1, T2). They demonstrate reduced neutral T2 identity recognition after angry or happy T1 expression, compared to neutral T1, and this supports attentional capture by a task-irrelevant feature. Crucially, after neutral T1, T2 identity recognition was enhanced and not suppressed when T2 was angry-suggesting that attentional capture by this task-irrelevant feature may be object-based and not feature-based. As an unexpected finding, both angry and happy facial expressions suppress memory access for competing objects, but only an...

Gaze direction and facial expressions are critical components of face processing and have been shown to influence attention deployment. We investigated whether gaze direction (direct vs. averted) combined with a neutral or angry expression modulates the deployment of attentional resources over time. In a Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) paradigm participants had to decide the gender of a neutral or an angry target face with direct or averted gaze (T1) and then to judge the orientation of a target picture of a landscape (T2), following the face at different time intervals. Results showed no attentional blink effect (i.e., no deterioration in T2 accuracy) when T1 was an angry face with direct gaze, whereas it was present for angry faces with averted gaze or neutral faces with either averted or direct gaze. These findings are consistent with appraisal theories and are discussed against the background of automatic processing of threat stimuli.

A single target presented in a sequence of non-target items (distracters) is detected easily, even when each item is presented less than 100 ms. However, when the number of targets is increased to two, the second one becomes hard to detect. In particular, the second target (T2) is often missed when it is followed by a distracter and the lag from the first target (T1) is 200-500 ms (ie, attentional blink). However, paradoxically, when T2 is presented just after T1, T2 is often successfully reported (ie, Lag-1 sparing).

With increasing work-load and societal stress the urge of break-taking in order to be resilient becomes more and more important. This research investigated how adding a short meditative exercise during a break affects performance on a subsequent cognitive task and how the effect dissipates over time. In a counterbalanced experimental design, first-year students (N=25) were asked to complete several blocks of an attentional blink task with intervening breaks in which they either counted their breath (i.e. meditation intervention) or crosses that appeared on the screen (i.e. control group). Trial blocks were segregated into three mini-blocks in order to track the dissipation of the stipulated effect over short time. Most important results showed an occurrence of the attentional blink (p<0.001) and an indication of an interaction effect between condition, lag and mini-block. That is, AB-size was higher for and increased over the first two mini-blocks in the cross counting more than in the breath counting condition, whereas for the third mini-block the opposite trend was observed. However, the effect was not significant (p = .104). The paper concludes with a discussion of obtained results and the study’s limitations.

What we cannot notice, we cannot be perceptually aware of either: This view, still very popular in contemporary analytic philosophy of mind, has been recently defended by M. Tye and A. Noë. The present paper tries to undermine this idea by referring to some empirical cases showing that we can be perceptually aware of something which our thematic attention fails to grasp. The limits of perception do not coincide with the limits of attention, and this holds not only in the case of so called “primary attention,” but also in the case of “secondary attention.” We therefore reject Arvidson’s hypothesis of the identity between the field of attention and the field of consciousness.

This study&#39;s research question was whether selective visual attention, and specifically the attentional blink (AB) as operationalized by a dual target rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task, can explain individual differences in word reading (WR) and reading-related phonological performances in typically developing children and reading-disabled subgroups. A total of 407 Dutch school children (Grades 3-6) were classified either as typically developing (n=302) or as belonging to one of three reading-disabled subgroups: reading disabilities only (RD-only, n=69), both RD and attention problems (RD+ADHD, n=16), or both RD and a specific language impairment (RD+SLI, n=20). The RSVP task employed alphanumeric stimuli that were presented in two blocks. Standardized Dutch tests were used to measure WR, phonemic awareness (PA), and alphanumeric rapid naming (RAN). Results indicate that, controlling for PA and RAN performance, general RSVP task performance contributes significant uni...

Several theories of the neural correlates of consciousness assume that there is a continuum of perception, associated with a gradual change in the intensity of brain activation. But some models, considering reverberation of neural activity as necessary for conscious perception, predict a sharp nonlinear transition between unconscious and conscious processing. We asked participants to evaluate the visibility of target words on a continuous scale during the attentional blink, which is known to impede explicit reports. Participants used this continuous scale in an all-or-none fashion: Targets presented during the blink were either identified as well as targets presented outside the blink period or not detected at all. We suggest that a stochastic nonlinear bifurcation in neural activity underlies the all-or-none perception observed during the attentional blink.

Colored target words were presented with distractor nonwords in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task. In Experiment 1, the attentional blink (AB) effect on T2 accuracy was larger when T1 was a difficult (low-frequency) word than when it was a high-frequency word. In Experiment 2 the effect of T1 frequency on the AB was replicated in a between-participants design, and the frequency of T1’s one-letter different neighbors (e.g., case, bare, for care) interacted with T1 frequency in its effects on T2 accuracy. Experiment 3 confirmed the effect of T1 frequency over 6 T1-T2 lags. The effects of T1 characteristics were sensitively assessed in the AB and were more consistent with resource depletion theories than control-process accounts.

1. There is considerable evidence indicating that people are primed to monitor social signals of disapproval. Thus far, studies on selective attention have concentrated predominantly on the spatial domain, whereas the temporal consequences of identifying socially threatening information have received only scant attention. Therefore, this study focused on temporal attention costs and examined how the presentation of emotional expressions affects subsequent identification of task-relevant information. High (n= 30) ...

The attentional blink (AB) is an impairment in detecting the second of two targets that appear in close temporal succession. We investigated the effect of practice and a nap on the magnitude of the AB deficit. We found evidence that sleep boosts practice-dependent reduction of the AB. Participants reported two target letters embedded in a rapid serial visual presentation display. After two morning sessions, half the participants took a polysomnographically recorded nap, while the others remained awake. Comparing two afternoon sessions to the two morning sessions, we observed a decreased AB only within the group who napped. The improvement was due to increased efficacy of the attentional selection of T2 (the probability of reporting a T2-relevant item). There was no change in selection’s latency or temporal precision. The magnitude of improvement was positively associated with the duration of N2 sleep and the number of N2 sleep spindles. Our results suggest that sleep, particularly N2 sleep and sleep spindles, improves attentional selection in time.

When two targets are embedded in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) stream of distractors, perception of the second target is impaired if the intertarget lag is relatively short (less than 500 msec). This phenomenon, calledattentional blink, has been attributed to a temporal inability of attentional resources. Nevertheless, a recent study found that observers could monitor two RSVP streams concurrently for up to four items presented in close succession, suggesting a much larger visual capacity limit. However, such high-capacity performance could be obtained by a rapid shift of attention, rather than concurrent monitoring of multiple locations. Therefore, the present study examined these alternatives. Results from six experiments indicate that observers can concurrently monitor two noncontiguous locations, even when targets and distractors are from different categories, such as digits, English alphabet letters, Japanese characters, and pseudocharacters. These results can be explained in terms of a modified input-filtering model in which a multidimensional attentional set can be flexibly configured at different spatial locations.