Comparison of event-related potentials in attentional blink and repetition blindess
In a recent study, Mika Koivisto and Antti Revonsuo compared the timing and mechanisms of attentional blink (AB) and repetition blindness (RB) directly during the same rapid serial visual presentation stream to examine the relation between the two phenomena. To do so, they recorded electrophysiological responses over the scalp (EEG, ERP) to repeated and unrepeated targets. The authors report the following […]
In a recent study, Mika Koivisto and Antti Revonsuo compared the timing and mechanisms of attentional blink (AB) and repetition blindness (RB) directly during the same rapid serial visual presentation stream to examine the relation between the two phenomena. To do so, they recorded electrophysiological responses over the scalp (EEG, ERP) to repeated and unrepeated targets.
The authors report the following findings:
Comparable to earlier ERP studies on visual awareness, the results showed for both types of targets a negative amplitude difference between ERPs to consciously recognized and unrecognized targets during 250-350 ms from stimulus onset, suggesting that both AB and RB are associated with deficits of conscious perception, occurring at earlier stages than access to working memory. However, the perceptual deficit in RB is more severe, which may be related to higher overall negativity in response to repeated targets observed 150-300 ms after stimulus onset, suggesting stronger cortical baseline activation and higher perceptual threshold for repeated targets as compared with unrepeated ones.
