What processes are disrupted during the attentional blink? An integrative review of event-related potential research

Abstract

Reporting the second of two targets is impaired when these appear in close succession, a phenomenon known as the attentional blink (AB). Despite decades of research, what factors limit our ability to process multiple sequentially presented events remains unclear. Specifically, two central issues remain open: does failure to report the second target (T2) reflect a structural limitation in working memory (WM) encoding or a disruption to attentional processes? And is perceptual processing of the stimulus that we fail to report impaired, or only processes that occur after this stimulus is identified? We address these questions by reviewing event-related potentials (ERP) studies of the AB, after providing a brief overview of the theoretical landscape relevant to these debates and clarifying key concepts essential for interpreting ERP studies. We show that failure to report the second target is most often associated with disrupted attentional engagement (associated with a smaller and delayed N2pc component). This disruption occurs after early processing of T2 (associated with an intact P1 component), weakens its semantic processing (typically associated with a smaller N400 component), and prevents its encoding into WM (associated with absent P3b). However, failure to encode T2 in WM can occur despite intact attentional engagement and semantic processing. We conclude that the AB phenomenon, which reflects our limited ability to process sequential events, emerges from the disruption of both attentional engagement and WM encoding.

Grounding the Attentional Boost Effect in Events and the Efficient Brain

“…Taskirrelevant perceptual learning occurs for stimuli paired with a target, but these effects are most reliable for stimuli that are presented below threshold, or outside focused attention, making them less likely to be inhibited by control mechanisms (Tsushima et al, 2008;Choi et al, 2009). It also overlaps with proposals suggesting that the attentional blink (the impaired ability to detect a target that occurs 200-500 ms after an earlier target), could reflect disruptions to control or selection mechanisms (Kawahara et al, 2006;Zivony and Lamy, 2021). In a similar way, disrupting control could also result in the inclusion of task-irrelevant information by the ABE.…”

The diachronic account of attentional selectivity

“…Second, when participants are asked to identify two successive targets (T1 and T2) in the RSVP stream (Fig. 3c), the accuracy of reporting both targets is high when they appear more than half a second apart, but report accuracy for T2 is strongly impaired when it is presented within 200-500 ms after T1 (attentional blink; Raymond, Shapiro, & Arnell, 1992; see Zivony & Lamy, 2021, for a discussion of different accounts of this phenomenon).…”

Decomposing the attentional blink.

“…However, not all studies agree; Jiang and Chun (2001) showed that selection of T2 during the AB becomes more difficult and is subject to larger spatial distractor interference, suggesting that selection mechanisms are indeed compromised. And evidence from event-related potentials (ERP; see Zivony & Lamy, 2021, for a recent review of ERP studies of the AB) studies shows that the N2pc component (i.e., an ERP component linked to selective attention) is largely reduced during the AB (Jolicœur et al, 2006). Using a well-defined measure of selectivity (indexed by the α-parameter), Experiment 3 contributes to this discussion by showing only a small nonsignificant increase in distractor interference during the AB.…”