Paying attention on all input leaves a gap called attention blink.Its awareness help people enhance their capability to pay attention.

1. By
Col Mukteshwar Prasad(Retd)
What Is Attentional Blink?

2. Introduction
 “Brain has limited attentional resources.” has no surprise to most
people. Focusing on multiple things at once, you would have likely
discovered that you could not fully pay attention to each and every thing in
the world around you. In some cases, some things seem to simply slide
past you unnoticed.
 When you shift your focus from one thing to another, a tiny "gap" in attention
is created lasting about half a second. This gap is known as an attentional
blink. During this gap, you are basically functionally blind.
 When a sequence of visual stimuli is presented in a rapid sequence in the
same spatial location, people often fail to detect a second target if it is
presented within 180 to 450 milliseconds of the first one.
 In one popular demonstration of the attentional blink, a series of letters and
numbers are flashed on a screen in a rapid sequence. The viewer is asked
to look for a specific pair of items, such as the number 2 and 7 and press a
button when they spot the target numbers. In many cases, observers fail to
see the second target when it occurs soon after the first one.
 Why? Since attention is limited, focusing on the first target depletes these

3. Why Does Attentional Blink Occur?
 Some experts suggest that the attentional blink serves as a way to help the
brain ignore distractions and focus on processing the first target.
 When an event occurs, the brain needs time to process it before it can move on to the next
event.
 If a second event occurs during this critical processing time, it will simply be missed.
 Inhibition theory suggests that perceptual confusion occurs during the
process of identifying targets, resulting in an attention gap.
 Shapiro and others propose an interference theory in which competition
for attention among the many items in a series results in focusing on the
wrong target.
 The attentional capacity theory proposes that the first target takes up too
much of the available attention resources, making it more difficult to process
the presentation of the second target.
 Another popular theory is the two-stage processing theory. According to
this idea, processing a series of items involves two different stages. The first
stage involves noticing the targets, while the second involves actually
processing the items so that they can be reported. Items must first be
identified and processed, but if the first target is still being processed, the

4. Attentional Blink in the Real-World
 While many of the demonstrations of attentional blink involve rapid serial
visual presentations in lab settings, this phenomenon can also influence
how you experience events in the real world.
 For example, imagine that you are driving your car down a busy road
when you notice that a car in front of you is starting to drift into the other
lane. As you focus on the scene down the road in front of you, your
attention becomes briefly focused on the other car, which then limits your
ability to attend to other traffic events happening in front of you for about
half a second.
 While that half-second period might seem very small, critical things can
happen that can affect your safety.
 A deer might leap out into the road. The car in front of you might slam on
its brakes. You might even start to drift slightly into the other lane.
 The attentional blink might be tiny, but it can certainly have serious
consequences in real-world settings.

5. Attentional Blink in the Real-World
 Interestingly, some research indicates that you might be able to train your
brain to shorten the attentional blink.
 Researchers Green and Bavelier had participants play video games for
one hour a day for a ten day period.
 They found that participants who had played an action-packed first-
person shooter game were able to recover from the attentional blink
faster at the end of the ten day period than participants who had played a
puzzle game.
 What explains the difference between the two groups?
 Since the attentional blink could have a serious effect on the score in
the first-person shooter game (players needed to be able to quickly
recognize and eliminate "bad guys" one after another), there was a
great deal of incentive to shorten the attentional recovery time.

6. Observations
 “… this attentional mechanism acts by reducing the
likelihood that stimuli will be attended following the
selection of a target; the effect lasts approximately
half a second. Such a time period is actually quite
long in 'attentional time.‘ Given the massive amount of
information received by the visual system, even
during short periods of time, perhaps the brain deals
with a potential overload of information by not fully
processing objects that it perceives to be the same in
a given temporal episode."
(Shapiro, 1994)

7. Observations
 "The attentional blink is a profound and robust, but it is not universal.
Several conditions have been found under which multiple targets can be
processed within a short period of time... According to selection theories, the
cause of the attentional blink lies not within the limited-capacity stage, but
within the filtering or gating mechanism that performs the transition from the
first to the second stage. The fact that performance on T2 is fine when there
are no intervening distractors indicates a crucial role for those distractors.
Selection theories, therefore, assume that distractors lead to active
suppression (i.e., disruption or inhibition) of the perceptual input."
(Olivers, 2013)

8. Reference
 Chun, D.M., & Potter, M.C. (1995). A two-stage model for multiple target detection in rapid serial visual
presentation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 21, 109-127.
 Duncan, J., Martens, S., & Ward, R. (1996). Restricted attention capacity within but not between sensory
modalities. Nature, 379, 808-810.
 Green, C. S., & Bavelier, D. (2003). Action video game modifies visual attention. Nature, 423, 534-537.
 Olivers, C. N. L. (2013). Attentional blink effect. In H. Pashler (Ed.). Encyclopedia of the Mind, Volume 1. Los
Angeles: SAGE Publications, Inc.
 Raymond, J. E., Shapiro, K. L. , Arnell, K. M. (1992). Temporary suppression of visual processing in an RSVP
task: An attentional blink? Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance 18 (3): 849–
60.
 Shapiro, K. L. (1994). The attentional blink: The brain's "eyeblink." Current Directions in Psychological Science,
3(3), 86-89.