The influence of temporal selection on spatial selection and distractor interference: An attentional blink study.

Both spatial and temporal selection require focused attention. The authors examine how temporal attention affects spatial selection. In a dual-task rapid serial visual presentation paradigm, temporal selection of a target (T1) impairs processing of a second target (T2) that follows T1 within 500 ms. This process is the attentional blink (AB). To test the effects of withdrawing temporal attention, the authors measured concurrent distractor interference on T2 when the distractors were presented during and outside of the AB. Perceptual interference was manipulated by the similarity in color between T2 and concurrent distractors, and response interference was manipulated by the flanker congruency task. Results showed that perceptual interference was larger during the AB. Response interference also increased during the AB, but only when perceptual interference was high. The authors conclude that temporal selection and spatial selection rely on a common attentional process. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Dual-task attention deficits in dysphoric mood.

The attentional functioning of nondysphoric, mildly dysphoric, and moderately to severely dysphoric college students was tested using the attentional blink (AB) paradigm. These groups performed equally well at reporting a single target appearing in a rapidly presented stream of stimuli. All groups showed an AB, with report sensitivity for a 2nd target being reduced when the 2 targets were presented less than 0.5 s apart. Nondysphoric and mildly dysphoric participants showed the same size ABs, but the ABs for moderately to severely dysphoric participants were larger and longer. As predicted, the results showed that moderately to severely dysphoric individuals have attentional impairments. These impairments, however, were evident only in the more demanding dual-task condition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A Psychophysical Measure of Attention Deficit in Children With Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder.

The authors explored the temporal mechanism of attention deficit in children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). In rapid serial visual presentation tasks in which two targets (T? and T?) were presented in close temporal proximity among distractors, participants tried to identify T? and detect T? in one (dual-task) experiment and only to detect T? in a second control (single-task) experiment. The sensitivity of T? detection was analyzed using signal detection theory. The attentional blink--the impairment in T? detection following the identification of T?--was increased in magnitude and protracted in the patients. Moreover, some ADHD children appeared to have a blink largely normal in magnitude but temporally displaced toward a later time. The authors hypothesize that a slower closing of the attention gate may mediate this specific attention impairment in ADHD children. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attentional changes during implicit learning: Signal validity protects a target stimulus from the attentional blink.

Participants in 2 experiments performed 2 simultaneous tasks: one, a dual-target detection task within a rapid sequence of target and distractor letters; the other, a cued reaction time task requiring participants to make a cued left–right response immediately after each letter sequence. Under these rapid visual presentation conditions, it is usually difficult to identify the 2nd target when it is presented in temporal proximity of the 1st target—a phenomenon known as the attentional blink. However, here participants showed an advantage for detecting a target presented during the attentional blink if that target predicted which response cue would appear at the end of the trial. Participants also showed faster reaction times on trials with a predictive target. Both of these effects were independent of conscious knowledge of the target–response contingencies assessed by postexperiment questionnaires. The results suggest that implicit learning of the association between a predictive target and its outcome can automatically facilitate target recognition during the attentional blink and therefore shed new light on the relationship between associative learning and attentional mechanisms. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attention, gaze shifting, and dual-task interference from phonological encoding in spoken word planning.

Controversy exists about whether dual-task interference from word planning reflects structural bottleneck or attentional control factors. Here, participants named pictures whose names could or could not be phonologically prepared, and they manually responded to arrows presented away from (Experiment 1), or superimposed onto, the pictures (Experiments 2 and 3); or they responded to tones (Experiment 4). Pictures and arrows/tones were presented at stimulus onset asynchronies of 0, 300, and 1,000 ms. Earlier research showed that vocal responding hampers auditory perception, which predicts earlier shifts of attention to the tones than to the arrows. Word planning yielded dual-task interference. Phonological preparation reduced the latencies of picture naming and gaze shifting. The preparation benefit was propagated into the latencies of the manual responses to the arrows but not to the tones. The malleability of the interference supports the attentional control account. This conclusion was corroborated by computer simulations showing that an extension of WEAVER++ (A. Roelofs, 2003) with assumptions about the attentional control of tasks quantitatively accounts for the latencies of vocal responding, gaze shifting, and manual responding. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Identification Facilitation for Emotionally Arousing Verbs During the Attentional Blink.

The present study aimed to examine affective modulation of the "attentional blink" effect during rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP). Pleasant, neutral, and unpleasant written verbs were used as a 2nd target (T2) in an 8.6-Hz RSVP paradigm. Pronounced effects of 1st target (T1)-T2 stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) were found, showing reduced report accuracy for 232- and 464-ms SOAs. Affectively arousing (pleasant and unpleasant) T2s were associated with enhanced accuracy compared with neutral T2s specifically during short (232 ms) SOAs. In contrast, pleasant and unpleasant T2s rated low in terms of emotional arousal did not show this enhancement. These results suggest that affectively arousing information is selected preferentially from a temporal stream, facilitating processes such as working memory consolidation and action. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Categorically defined targets trigger spatiotemporal visual attention.

Transient attention to a visually salient cue enhances processing of a subsequent target in the same spatial location between 50 to 150 ms after cue onset (K. Nakayama & M. Mackeben, 1989). Do stimuli from a categorically defined target set, such as letters or digits, also generate transient attention? Participants reported digit targets among keyboard symbols in a changing array of 8 items. When 1 target preceded a second target in the same location at a stimulus onset asynchrony of 107 ms (but not 213 ms), the second target was reported more often than in a condition in which there was no leading target. When the 2 targets were at different locations, report of the second target was impaired. With both letters and digits as targets, the enhancement effect was shown not to be due to category priming. Critically, the attentional benefit was present whether or not participants reported the leading target. Transient attention, contingent attentional capture, popout, and Lag 1 sparing in the attentional blink may involve a common mechanism for orienting processing resources towards salient and task relevant stimuli. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Similarity determines the attentional blink.

When participants are required to respond to a target letter imbedded in a stream of rapid serially presented letters, perception of a 2nd target letter is impaired if the interval between the 2 targets is less than about 450 ms. This attentionally based posttarget suppression in visual processing, referred to as the attentional blink (AB), is not found when there is a brief pause in the stream immediately after the 1st target. To investigate the importance of posttarget stimulation in AB production, the categorical, featural, and spatial similarity of the immediate posttarget item to other items in the stream was manipulated. Although featural and spatial dissimilarity produced significant attenuation of the AB effect, categorical dissimilarity did not. Significant AB effects were found in all conditions, suggesting that the presentation of any patterned stimulus in close temporal proximity to the target provokes the AB. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attentional control and the relatedness proportion effect in semantic priming.

In 2 experiments, participants completed both an attentional control battery (OSPAN, antisaccade, and Stroop tasks) and a modified semantic priming task. The priming task measured relatedness proportion (RP) effects within subjects, with the color of the prime indicating the probability that the to-be-named target would be related. In Experiment 2, participants were cued before each trial with the probability of a related target. Stimulus onset asynchronies traditionally thought to tap automatic processing (267 ms) versus controlled processing (1,240 ms) were used. Across experiments, principal component analysis on the battery revealed a general attentional control component. Moreover, the RP effect increased linearly with attentional control in both experiments. It is concluded that RP effects produced in this paradigm depend purely upon the effortful process of expectancy generation, which renders them sensitive to individual differences in attentional control. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Personal names and the attentional blink: a visual "cocktail party" effect

Four experiments were carried out to investigate an early- versus late-selection explanation for the attentional blink (AB). In both Experiments 1 and 2, 3 groups of participants were required to identify a noun (Experiment 1) or a name (Experiment 2) target (experimental conditions) and then to identify the presence or absence of a 2nd target (probe), which was their own name, another name, or a specified noun from among a noun distractor stream (Experiment 1) or a name distractor stream (Experiment 2). The conclusions drawn are that individuals do not experience an AB for their own names but do for either other names or nouns. In Experiments 3 and 4, either the participant's own name or another name was presented, as the target and as the item that immediately followed the target, respectively. An AB effect was revealed in both experimental conditions. The results of these experiments are interpreted as support for a late-selection interference account of the AB.     

Attentional capture by emotional stimuli is modulated by semantic processing.

The attentional blink paradigm was used to examine whether emotional stimuli always capture attention. The processing requirement for emotional stimuli in a rapid sequential visual presentation stream was manipulated to investigate the circumstances under which emotional distractors capture attention, as reflected in an enhanced attentional blink effect. Emotional distractors did not cause more interference than neutral distractors on target identification when perceptual or phonological processing of stimuli was required, showing that emotional processing is not as automatic as previously hypothesized. Only when semantic processing of stimuli was required did emotional distractors capture more attention than neutral distractors and increase attentional blink magnitude. Combining the results from 5 experiments, the authors conclude that semantic processing can modulate the attentional capture effect of emotional stimuli. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Surprise-induced blindness: A stimulus-driven attentional limit to conscious perception.

The cost of attending to a visual event can be the failure to consciously detect other events. This processing limitation is well illustrated by the attentional blink paradigm, in which searching for and attending to a target presented in a rapid serial visual presentation stream of distractors can impair one's ability to detect a second target presented soon thereafter. The attentional blink critically depends on 'top-down' attentional settings, for it does not occur if participants are asked to ignore the first target. Here we show that 'bottom-up' attention can also lead to a profound but ephemeral deficit in conscious perception: Presentation of a novel, unexpected, and task-irrelevant stimulus virtually abolishes conscious detection of a target presented within half a second after the 'Surprise' stimulus, but only for its earliest occurrences (generally 1 to 2 presentations). This powerful but short-lived deficit contrasts with a milder but more enduring form of attentional capture that accompanies singleton presentations in rapid serial visual presentations. We conclude that the capture of stimulus-driven attention alone can limit explicit perception. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

When visual marking meets the attentional blink: More evidence for top-down, limited-capacity inhibition.

An attentional blink (AB) paradigm was used to investigate the attentional resources necessary for visual marking. The results showed that distractors presented inside the AB cannot easily be ignored despite participants anticipating a future target display. This supports the hypothesis that attentional resources are required for visual marking. In addition, probe dots were better detected on blinked distractors than on successfully ignored distractors, but only when the task required new items to be prioritized. In a final experiment, a stronger negative carry-over effect on search occurred for targets identical to distractors presented outside rather than inside the AB. This suggests that at least part of the inhibitory processes involved in visual marking are nonspatial. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Unmasking the attentional blink.

When asked to identify 2 visual targets (T1 and T2 for the 1st and 2nd targets, respectively) embedded in a sequence of distractors, observers will often fail to identify T2 when it appears within 200-500 ms of T1--an effect called the attentional blink. Recent work shows that attention does not blink when the task is to encode a sequence of consecutive targets, suggesting that distractor interference plays a causal role in the attentional blink. Here, however, the authors show that an attentional blink occurs even in the absence of distractors, with 2 letter targets separated by a blank interval. In addition, the authors found that the impairment for identification of the 2nd of 2 targets separated by a blank interval is substantially attenuated either when the intertarget interval is filled with additional target items or when the 2nd target is precued by an additional target. These findings show that the root cause of the blink lies in the difficulty of engaging attention twice within a short period of time for 2 temporally discrete target events. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

"The attentional blink reflects retrieval competition among multiple rapid serial visual presentation items: Tests of an interference model": Erratum.

Reports an error in "The attentional blink reflects retrieval competition among multiple rapid serial visual presentation items: Tests of an interference model" by Matthew I. Isaak, Kimron L. Shapiro and Jesse Martin (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 1999[Dec], Vol 25[6], 1774-1792). On p. 1778, the correct Figure 1 was inadvertently replaced in the production process with an erroneous figure. The erratum contains the corrected figure. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2000-15288-019.) When people respond to a target (T1) in a rapid serial visual presentation stream, their perception of a subsequent target (T2) is impaired if the intertarget stimulus onset asynchrony is between about 100 and 500 ms. Three experiments supported the interference model's (K. L. Shapiro, J. E. Raymond, & K. M. Arnell, 1994) claim that this attentional blink reflects competition for retrieval among multiple items in visual short-term memory. Experiments 1 and 2 revealed that items appearing during the blink are named as T2 on an above-chance proportion of trials when T2 must be identified. Experiment 3 demonstrated that both the size of the blink and sensitivity to T2 reflected the number of items competing for retrieval as T2; such competition, moreover, occurred at a conceptual or categorical level rather than at a purely visual one. The relationship between the interference and alternative models of the attentional blink is discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Modulation of the attentional blink by differential resource allocation.

When one masked target (T2) follows another (T1) in close temporal proximity, identification accuracy of the second target is reduced for a period referred to as the attentional blink. Analysis of the attentional blink literature suggests that increasing the difficulty of T1 processing increases the magnitude of the blink. In a previous study that eliminated several untoward features of the typical attentional blink design (e.g., task switching, location switching, and stream contribution), we found no effect on blink magnitude when three levels of T1 difficulty (manipulated in a data-limited manner) were randomly intermixed. Here, when we repeated the previous study, with 20 college students, using a blocked manipulation of T1 difficulty, which is characteristic of the literature, a significant positive relation between T1 difficulty and blink magnitude was found. Resource allocation put in place to encode T1 in advance of a dual-target trial thus seems to be the critical factor in mediating this relation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Angry facial expressions hamper subsequent target identification.

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) and low (n = 31) socially anxious women were exposed to a dual-target rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) paradigm. Emotional faces (neutral, happy, angry) were presented as the first target (T1) and neutral letter stimuli (p, q, d, b) as the second target (T2). Irrespective of social anxiety, the attentional blink was relatively large when angry faces were presented as T1. This apparent prioritized processing of angry faces is consistent with evolutionary models, stressing the importance of being especially attentive to potential signals of social threat. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Repetition Blindness: Out of Sight or Out of Mind?

Does repetition blindness represent a failure of perception or of memory? In Experiment 1, participants viewed rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) sentences. When critical words (C1 and C2) were orthographically similar, C2 was frequently omitted from serial report; however, repetition priming for C2 on a postsentence lexical decision task was equivalent whether or not C1 was similar to C2. In Experiment 2, participants monitored RSVP sentences for a predetermined target. Participants frequently failed to detect the target when it was preceded by an orthographically similar word. In Experiment 3, the authors investigated the role of the attentional blink in this effect. These experiments suggest that repetition blindness is a failure of conscious perception, consistent with predictions of the token-individuation hypothesis. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The sparing is far from spurious: Reevaluating within-trial contingency effects in the attentional blink.

The attentional blink is the marked deficit in awareness of a 2nd target (T2) when it is presented shortly after the 1st target (T1) in a stream of distractors. When the distractors between T1 and T2 are replaced by even more targets, the attentional blink is reduced or absent, indicating that the attentional blink results from online selection mechanisms that act in response to distracting input rather than being the result of T1-induced cognitive resource depletion. However, Dell'Acqua, Jolicoeur, Luria, and Pluchino (2009) recently contended that an attentional blink is found in the multiple-target case as long as the appropriate trial context and analyses are used, thus reinstating resource-based explanations of the attentional blink and challenging the selection account. Specifically, an attentional blink reemerges when target performance is analyzed contingent on previous target accuracy. We argue on theoretical and empirical grounds that neither the trial context nor the type of analysis poses a serious problem for selection accounts. We show that the attentional blink and previous target contingency effects can be dissociated, with the latter depending more on low-level, short-range competition. We conclude that selection mechanisms involved in filtering for targets still provide a strong and coherent explanation of the attentional blink. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

The fearful-face advantage is modulated by task demands: Evidence from the attentional blink.

Fearful faces receive privileged access to awareness relative to happy and nonemotional faces. We investigated whether this advantage depends on currently available attentional resources. In an attentional blink paradigm, observers detected faces presented during the attentional blink period that could depict either a fearful or a happy expression. Perceptual load of the blink-inducing target was manipulated by increasing flanker interference. For the low-load condition, fearful faces were detected more often than happy faces, replicating previous reports. More important, this advantage for fearful faces disappeared for the high-load condition, during which fearful and happy faces were detected equally often. These results suggest that the privileged access of fearful faces to awareness does not occur mandatorily, but instead depends on attentional resources. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)