The perceptual wink model of non-switching attentional blink tasks

Differences in the duration of the attentional blink when viewing nature vs. urban scenes

The current study examined how viewing nature vs. urban scenes impacts the duration of the attentional blink. Nature scenes produce a broader allocation of attention, allowing attention to spread and reduce the ability to disengage attention. Urban scenes produce a narrowed allocation of attention, allowing efficient encoding of relevant information, inhibition of irrelevant information and a speedier disengagement of attention. Participants viewed a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) of either nature or urban scenes. For both scene categories, an attentional blink was evident by reduced accuracy for reporting a second target that occurred two or three scenes after an accurately reported first target. However, the duration of the attentional blink was reduced for urban scenes compared with nature scenes. A peripheral target detection task confirmed a difference in the allocation of attention between scene categories. The peripheral targets were better detected for nature scenes, suggesting that participants have a broader spread of attention for nature scenes, even in an RSVP task. The shorter duration of the attentional blink for urban scenes was consistent across four experiments with small and large sets of urban and nature scenes. Therefore, urban scenes reliably reduce the attentional blink duration compared with nature scenes, and this could be attributed to a narrowed attention allocation that allows speedier disengagement of attention in an RSVP.

Neural habituation enhances novelty detection: an EEG study of rapidly presented words

Huber and O'Reilly (2003) proposed that neural habituation aids perceptual processing, separating neural responses to currently viewed objects from recently viewed objects. However, synaptic depression has costs, producing repetition deficits. Prior work confirmed the transition from repetition benefits to deficits with increasing duration of a prime object, but the prediction of enhanced novelty detection was not tested. The current study examined this prediction with a same/different word priming task, using support vector machine (SVM) classification of EEG data, ERP analyses focused on the N400, and dynamic neural network simulations fit to behavioral data to provide a priori predictions of the ERP effects. Subjects made same/different judgements to a response word in relation to an immediately preceding brief target word; prime durations were short (50ms) or long (400ms), and long durations decreased P100/N170 responses to the target word, suggesting that this manipulation increased habituation. Following long duration primes, correct "different" judgments of primed response words increased, evidencing enhanced novelty detection. An SVM classifier predicted trial-by-trial behavior with 66.34% accuracy on held-out data, with greatest predictive power at a time pattern consistent with the N400. The habituation model was augmented with a maintained semantics layer (i.e., working memory) to generate behavior and N400 predictions. A second experiment used response-locked ERPs, confirming the model's assumption that residual activation in working memory is the basis of novelty decisions. These results support the theory that neural habituation enhances novelty detection, and the model assumption that the N400 reflects updating of semantic information in working memory.