Musical minds: attentional blink reveals modality-specific restrictions.

Background: Formal musical training is known to have positive effects on attentional and executive functioning, processing speed, and working memory. Consequently, one may expect to find differences in the dynamics of temporal attention between musicians and non-musicians. Here we address the question whether that is indeed the case, and whether any beneficial effects of musical training on temporal attention are modality specific or generalize across sensory modalities.

Training-induced Changes in the Dynamics of Attention as Reflected in Pupil Dilation.

One of the major topics in attention literature is the attentional blink (AB), which demonstrates a limited ability to identify the second of two targets (T1 and T2) when presented in close temporal succession (200-500 msec). Given that the effect has been thought of as robust and resistant to training for over two decades, one of the most remarkable findings in recent years is that the AB can be eliminated after a 1-hr training with a color-salient T2. However, the underlying mechanism of the training effect as well as the AB itself is as of yet still poorly understood.

Word frequency and the attentional blink: the effects of target difficulty on retrieval and consolidation processes.

Background: When a second target (T2) is presented in close succession of a first target (T1) within a stream of non-targets, people often fail to detect T2-a deficit known as the attentional blink (AB). Two types of theories can be distinguished that have tried to account for this phenomenon. Whereas attentional-control theories suggest that protection of consolidation processes induces the AB, limited-resource theories claim that the AB is caused by a lack of resources.

Individual differences in the attentional blink: the temporal profile of blinkers and non-blinkers.

Background: When two targets are presented in close temporal succession, the majority of people frequently fail to report the second target. This phenomenon, known as the 'attentional blink' (AB), has been a major topic in attention research for the past twenty years because it is informative about the rate at which stimuli can be encoded into consciously accessible representations. An aspect of the AB that has long been ignored, however, is individual differences.

Pupil dilation deconvolution reveals the dynamics of attention at high temporal resolution.

The size of the human pupil increases as a function of mental effort. However, this response is slow, and therefore its use is thought to be limited to measurements of slow tasks or tasks in which meaningful events are temporally well separated. Here we show that high-temporal-resolution tracking of attention and cognitive processes can be obtained from the slow pupillary response.

Distracting the mind improves performance: an ERP Study.

Background: When a second target (T2) is presented in close succession of a first target (T1), people often fail to identify T2, a phenomenon known as the attentional blink (AB). However, the AB can be reduced substantially when participants are distracted during the task, for instance by a concurrent task, without a cost for T1 performance. The goal of the current study was to investigate the electrophysiological correlates of this paradoxical effect.