The attentional blink unveils the interplay between conscious perception, spatial attention and working memory encoding.
Consciousness and cognition October 1, 2020 Eyal Alef Ophir, Guido Hesselmann, Dominique Lamy 5 citations
The attentional blink is a limitation in perceiving two events close in time. Three experiments disentangled the roles of spatial attention, conscious perception, and working memory in causing this blink. Allocating spatial attention to the first target (T1) was neither necessary nor sufficient for eliciting a blink, but consciously perceiving T1 was necessary yet not sufficient. When T1 was task irrelevant, conscious perception triggered a blink only when T1 matched the attentional set for the second target (T2). The authors conclude that consciously perceiving a task-relevant event causes the blink, possibly because it triggers encoding into working memory, with implications for the distinction between access and phenomenal consciousness.