How the brain blinks: towards a neurocognitive model of the attentional blink

Abstract

When people monitor a visual stream of rapidly presented stimuli for two targets (T1 and T2), they often miss T2 if it falls into a time window of about half a second after T1 onset-the attentional blink (AB). We provide an overview of recent neuroscientific studies devoted to analyze the neural processes underlying the AB and their temporal dynamics. The available evidence points to an attentional network involving temporal, right-parietal and frontal cortex, and suggests that the components of this neural network interact by means of synchronization and stimulus-induced desynchronization in the beta frequency range. We set up a neurocognitive scenario describing how the AB might emerge and why it depends on the presence of masks and the other event(s) the targets are embedded in. The scenario supports the idea that the AB arises from "biased competition", with the top-down bias being generated by parietal-frontal interactions and the competition taking place between stimulus codes in temporal cortex.

Working memory and the attentional blink: Blink size is predicted by individual differences in operation span

“…Taken together our results support models that attribute the AB to WM in general and to operational resource limitations (Dehaene, Sergent, & Changeux, 2003;Di Lollo et al, 2005;Gross et al, 2004;Hommel et al, 2006) in particular. These results fit well with the idea that differences between individuals with good versus poor working memory reflect differences in the ability to efficiently handle working memory contents and to control attentional selection (Engle, Kane, & Tuholski, 1999;Kane et al, 2004).…”

Prior entry explains order reversals in the attentional blink

“…In other words, the inhibition is not just the result of a limitation but is, in itself, functional. This argument has been made earlier by Hommel et al (2006), who argued that the systems tendency to carve up information processing into discrete events makes it behave like a serial model. The new version, eSTST, no longer assumes that episodic coding is severely limited, since multiple traces can be created (near-) simultaneously.…”

“…It was thought that whereas the attentional blink occurs because T1 takes away attentional or mnemonic resources from T2, lag 1 sparing occurs because T1 and T2 are processed within a single attentional episode and are tied to a single memory representation. More recently, the two phenomena have received more integrated explanations, in which the attentional blink is regarded as the failure to create two episodes within a short interval, whereas lag 1 sparing reflects the successful integration of the two targets in a single episode (Bowman & Wyble, 2007;Hommel et al, 2006). In any case, the high incidence of order reversals has been taken as evidence for the episodic integration of T1 and T2.…”

“…Many attentional blink theories assume that the T1 episode ends only after T1 consolidation is completed (e.g., Akyürek et al, 2007Akyürek et al, , 2008Bowman & Wyble, 2007;Chua, 2005;Chun & Potter, 1995). Furthermore, some have suggested that an episode can be flexibly extended as long as relevant information is entering the system (this is necessary to explain the phenomenon that sparing spreads to lag 2 and even 3 when more targets are presented; Di Lollo et al, 2005;Hommel et al, 2006;Nieuwenstein & Potter, 2006;Olivers et al, 2007;Shih, 2008;Wyble, Bowman, & Nieuwenstein, 2009). Note that here, the relevant T1 information occurs at exactly the same temporal position in both conditions.…”

The "beam of darkness": Spreading of the attentional blink within and between objects

“…The reduction of T2 identification at relatively short temporal lags occurs because limited attentional resources are still engaged in processing and consolidating T1. At longer lags, the ability to process T2 recovers because resources are released when T1 processing has terminated (for reviews, see Hommel et al, 2006, andArnell, 1997).…”