Individual Difference In Attentional Blink

The attentional blink (AB) effect refers to the phenomenon of when participants exhibit an impaired ability to report a second target (T2) which appears within the time window of 200-500 ms after a first target (T1) within a stream of distractors. Recently, there has been a growing interest in investigating individual differences in the AB effect.The present paper firstly reviews recent studies which have explored individual differences in the AB effect from the cognitive, emotional, and personality perspectives. These differences have mainly been found to be embodied in working memory, the ability to inhibit distractors, dispositional focus, and personality. Such a transitory impairment of attention has been named as attentional blink (AB). While much imaging work has been devoted to understanding the neural mechanisms of AB, the individual differences between non-blinkers and blinkers in the resting-state has not been investigated enough before.Here, the experiment 1 investigated whether there is a significant difference using the rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task. The RSVP is the type of alphanumeric where the letter is target and the number is the distractor. We first took the SPSS 16.0 to judge whether there was a significant Attentional Blink (AB), and the answer was correct, then we began to divide them into two groups based on the previous behavioral research, which named non-blinkers and blinkers separately. Finally we got the results by using the multivariate analysis of variance to investigate the difference between the two groups and within the lags. A repeated measure analysis of variance (RM-ANOVA) of T1 accuracy with group (non-blinkers and blinkers) as a between-subjects variable and lag (1,2,3,4,5,6,7 and 8) as a within-subjects variable revealed a significant main effect of lag, However, the main effect of group or the interaction between group and lag was not significant, indicating that there was no significant difference between non-blinkers and blinkers in T1.An RM-ANOVA of T2 performance given correct report of T1 (T2|T1) with group as a between-subjects variable and lag as a within-subjects variable revealed a significant main effect of group, a significant main effect of lag, and a significant interaction between group and lag, reflecting the significant difference in T2/T1 between non-blinkers and blinkers.Experiment 2 took advantage of the resting-state method to investigate the small-world of brain network between non-blinkers and blinkers. We found that in the macro level, namely the global whole brains, the shortest path length of the non-blinker are significantly smaller than that of blinkers. In corresponding to the shortest path length, the global efficiency of non-blinkers are bigger than that of blinkers, which means that the non-blinkers transformed information more efficiently than blinkers. In the micro level, namely the local brain regions, Blinkers are also bigger than non-blinkers in the shortest path length in the front-parietal regions.In summary, the non-blinkers relative to blinkers transformed information more efficiently; moreover, non-blinkers compared to blinkers have better cognitive control ability. The present study revealed the intrinsic differences between non-blinkers and blinkers in general processing speed and cognitive control ability, throwing light on the mechanisms of the generation of the AB.