title: Practice begets the second target: task repetition and the attentional blink effect.
abstract: Even with unimpaired vision, observers sometimes fail to see things right before their open eyes. A typical example is the attentional blink effect, a period in which observers are unable to detect a target item in a sequence of stimuli, for as long as the previous one occupies their mind. Having considered a range of mechanisms proposed to explain attentional blink effect, we arrive at our preferred explanation, which ascribes the effect to a contextually motivated imbalance in the allocation of attentional resources between earlier and later target information. We interpret in this perspective our data on how the attentional blink effect changes as a result of practice.
authors.affiliation: Laboratory for Perceptual Dynamics, RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Wako-shi, Saitama, Japan. cnakatani@brain.riken.jp
authors.forename: Chie
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Nakatani
authors.forename: Shruti
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Baijal
authors.forename: Cees
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: van Leeuwen
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D054518:Attentional Blink / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008570:Memory, Short-Term / Q000502:physiology; D010470:Perceptual Masking / Q000502:physiology; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D011214:Practice, Psychological; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D013997:Time Factors