The change of attentional blink and repetition blindness after cerebellar lesions

Abstract

Attentional blink is the failure to identify a second target following a first target when both have appeared in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task. Repetition blindness is an additional difficulty to recognize the second same target in a RSVP task. Attentional blink and repetition blindness have many phenomenal similarities and can be experimentally dissociated. Repetition blindness may reflect the visual information processing stage prior to the central limitation stages. Many studies suggest that the cerebellum is involved in cognitive abilities, including attentional blink. fMRI studies have shown cerebellum activation in RSVP tasks, but the details of how the cerebellum is involved in the mechanism of attentional blink is unclear. In this study, we investigated attentional blink and repetition blindness performance in 10 patients with focal lesions of the cerebellum and 10 healthy controls using the RSVP task. Patients with cerebellar lesions demonstrated a longer attentional blink duration and a larger magnitude compared with controls. The performance of repetition blindness was lower than that of attentional blink in the control group, but the differences between the attentional blink and repetition blindness conditions in the patient group had no significance. The performance of repetition blindness between the two groups showed no significance. These data indicate that the cerebellum may be related to the central processing stage of visual temporal attention. Also, we provide new evidence to support the idea that the cerebellum is involved in non-motor functions.