The attentional blink unveils the interplay between conscious perception, spatial attention and working memory encoding.

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.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Our ability to perceive two events in close temporal succession is severely limited, a phenomenon known as the attentional blink. While the blink has served as a popular tool to prevent conscious perception, there is less research on its causes, and in particular on the role of conscious perception of the first event in triggering it. In three experiments, we disentangled the roles of spatial attention, conscious perception and working memory (WM) in causing the blink. We show that while allocating spatial attention to T1 is neither necessary nor sufficient for eliciting a blink, consciously perceiving it is necessary but not sufficient. When T1 was task irrelevant, consciously perceiving it triggered a blink only when it matched the attentional set for T2. We conclude that consciously perceiving a task-relevant event causes the blink, possibly because it triggers encoding of this event into WM. We discuss the implications of these findings for the relationship between spatial attention, conscious perception and WM, as well as for the distinction between access and phenomenal consciousness.