Immediate Temporal Information Modulates the Target Identification in the Attentional Blink.

Fangshu Yao,Xiaochun Wang,Bin Zhou,Yiyun Zhuang

doi:10.3390/brainsci12020278

Fangshu Yao, Xiaochun Wang + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci12020278

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Abstract

It has been shown that learned temporal information can be exploited to help facilitate the target identification in the attentional blink task. Here, we tested whether similar exploitation also worked on short-term temporal information, even when it did not reliably predict the target onset. In two experiments, we randomly manipulated either the interval between targets (T1 and T2; Experiment 1) or the temporal regularity of stimulus presentation (Experiment 2) in each trial. The results revealed evidence of effects of immediate temporal experience mainly on T2 performances but also occasionally on T1 performances. In general, the accuracy of T2 was enhanced when a longer inter-target interval was explicitly processed in the preceding trial (Experiment 1) or the temporal regularity, regardless of being explicitly or implicitly processed, was present in the stimulus stream, especially after T1 (Experiment 2). These results suggest that, under high temporal uncertainty, both interval and rhythmic cues can still be exploited to regulate the allocation of processing resources, thus, modulating the target identification in the attentional blink task, consistent with the view of flexible attentional allocation, and further highlighting the importance of the interplay between temporal processing and attentional control in the conscious visual perception.

Highlights

Our visual system is capable of sampling inputs with high temporal resolution on the scale of tens of milliseconds [1], we still suffer severe temporal limitations when identifying successive items presented within about half a second
Such constraint in conscious report is assumed to be associated with the operation of attentional functions, and is demonstrated clearly in the attentional blink (AB) phenomenon [2,3], where the success in identifying the first target (T1) in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) stream often comes at the expense of the second target (T2), in stark contrast to the high accuracy when only T2 is to be reported
As we mentioned in the Introduction, we focused our discussion on the AB effect; it is interesting to examine whether and how the temporal information modulates the processes within one attentional episode, the lag1 sparing in future research

Summary

Introduction

Our visual system is capable of sampling inputs with high temporal resolution on the scale of tens of milliseconds [1], we still suffer severe temporal limitations when identifying successive items presented within about half a second. The performance of judging T2 does not fully recover until the interval between targets goes beyond about 500 ms (referred to as lag under the convention of AB). This phenomenon likely arises due to limited central processing resources [4,5] or sub-optimal allocation of these resources on especially T2 processing when it shortly follows T1 [6,7,8]. The AB effect, sometimes the lag sparing, is modulated by various factors [10,11,12,13,14]

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