Eye movements blink the Attentional Blink

KAMIENKOWSKI JE; NAVAJAS, J; SIGMAN M

JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY-HUMAN PERCEPTION AND PERFORMANCE

AMER PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOC

Lugar: Washington; Año: 2012 vol. 38 p. 555 - 560

0096-1523

When presented with a sequence of visual stimuli in rapid succession, participants often fail to detect a second salient target, a phenomenon referred as the attentional blink (AB) (Raymond, Shapiro, & Arnell, 1992; Shapiro, Raymond, & Arnell, 1997). Based on a vast corpus of experiments, several cognitive theories suggest that the blink results from a discrete structuring of attention, sampling information from temporal episodes during which several items can access encoding process (Wyble, Bowman, & Nieuwenstein, 2009; Wyble, Potter, Bowman, & Nieuwenstein, 2011). The objective of this work is to explore the AB when multiple items are presented at the fovea during ocular movements. We reasoned that each fixation may cohesively form an episode and hence expected that the blink may vanish within a single fixation.  In turn, we expected saccades to accentuate episodic borders and hence shorten the regime of interference when two targets are presented fovealy in successive fixations. We provide evidence in favor of this hypothesis showing that the blink vanishes when both targets are presented in the core of a single-fixation (far from the saccadic boundaries) and that it recovers more rapidly in successive fixations. These studies support current views that episodes should have an effect on the AB and provide evidence that eye-movements play an important role in the formation of episodes.