ERIC Number: EJ1464940
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2025-Dec
Pages: 13
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: N/A
EISSN: EISSN-2365-7464
Available Date: 2025-03-28
Temporal Context Modulates the Recovery of the Attentional Blink
Fangshu Yao1; Bin Zhou2,3
Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, v10 Article 14 2025
Humans usually adjust their attentional mode to tackle the challenges posed by environmental inputs. Depending on the uncertainty level, different attentional strategies may be adopted. As people face increasingly complicated daily situations--e.g., driving a car or chatting online--where intervals between significant events do not necessarily follow certain rules but are likely random, it appears important to understand how temporal contexts with different uncertainty levels affect temporal attention allocation when processing rapid serial inputs. We pursued this issue by employing a task examining the temporal limit of attention--the attentional blink (AB). The manipulation of temporal context was achieved by presenting trials with different inter-target intervals following either a "random-walk" or a "random" sequence. The results suggest a facilitated recovery from the AB deficit in the "random" compared to "random-walk" context, without a corresponding change in AB magnitude. Such effect is likely attributed to the higher perceived uncertainty in the former, and could be attenuated by a decrease in the temporal uncertainty level. These observations suggest that observers likely adopted a more flexible temporal attention allocation in the more unpredictable "random" context; they also support non-overlapping mechanisms responsible for AB width/duration and amplitude or lag-1 sparing. The flexibility of temporal attentional control may provide an evolutionary advantage for organisms to deal with unpredictable changes and is likely to be exploited for reference in the design of human-machine interacting platforms.
Descriptors: Attention Control, Eye Movements, Time, Time Perspective, Context Effect, Intervals, Man Machine Systems, Interaction
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Data File: URL: https://osf.io/ybrp5/
Author Affiliations: 1Shanghai University of Sport, School of Psychology, Key Laboratory of Motor Cognitive Assessment and Regulation, Shanghai, China; 2Chinese Academy of Sciences, State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Science and Mental Health, Institute of Psychology, Beijing, China; 3University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Department of Psychology, Beijing, China