The Effect Of Implicit Cues On Attentional Blink

Attentional blink is a kind of functional blindness.Under conditions of rapid serial visual presentation,subjects display a deficit in the identification of a second of two consecutive targets(T2)in a stream of distractors that usually arises when T2 follows an initial target(T1)during about 200ms-500ms.Attentional blink reflects the limits of human's ability to consciously perceive stimuli in the time dimension,it is an effective way to study the process of attention and the integration of memory,it has also provided researcher with a tool to study one of the most interesting topics in cognitive neuroscience,human conscious.In the study of Nieuwenstein(2005),there was a distraction stimulus which has the same color with the T2 displayed between the two targets.The results showed that the correct rate of T2 was significantly improved.Since then a large number of studies have shown that,When there is a clear clue in the experiment that tell the subjects the time of the target or the target position,target reporting rate will be improved,but when the ambiguous implicit cue was given,the conclusion is inconsistent.In the past,the influence of implicit information in the attentional blink was investigated by adjusting the probability of target.In this study,stimulus sequence which will not change around different trials was used as a cue to hint the T2.The aim of the study was to investigate whether the implicit cue can make the attentional blink smaller.The effects of implicit sequence cues on attentional blink were investigated by two experiments.The first experiment used the Rapid Serial Visual Presentation paradigm to see if there is any effect of implicit cues on lags of attentional blink.Stimulus presentation 67ms,there was a 16ms screen between the two stimuli.The results showed that neither implicit cues nor time interval influence the accuracy of T1.Implicit cues had no effect on T2.However,there is no attentional blink phenomenon when provide implicit cues,attentional blink existed without implicit cues.The second experiment was done in order to exclude the effect of ceiling effect.We cancel the empty screen between the stimuli,the results are as follows:First,the T2 accuracy of the lag2 position under the condition of implicit cues was significantly improved,and the correct rate of T2 on Lagl position decreased significantly.Second,The attentional blink occurs with two conditions,and the implicit sequence information can only improve the report of T2 during attentional blink window,and this phenomenon can not be eliminated.Finally,there was no effect of implicit sequence cues on T2 reports outside the attentional blink window.The experiments proved that the implicit sequence cues can improve the accuracy of T2 within attentional blink window,so as to eliminate the phenomenon of attentional blink.Interference model can provide explain for the results.This study suggests that implicit cues can increase the perceptual characteristics of the target and gain more weight in the resource competition.