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ZAPS #4 Attentional Blink

Introduction

1. What question is being explored by this experiment?

The question explored in the experiment relates to attentional blinking. What is the lower

boundary of the attentional capacity to perceive visual stimuli presented very quickly?

2. Describe what an interstimulus interval is and how it is represented in this experimental

setup.

Interstimulus interval refers to the interval time between the presentation of visual

stimuli, such as the targeted letters in the experimental setup. The attention blink

experiment integrated an interstimulus interval to understand the subject’s ability to

perceive, process, and recognize two visual stimuli at different intervals. Resultantly,

manipulation of the interstimulus interval, the instant (with lower intervals) second visual

stimuli remained unattended in the conscious mind because of the attention blink

occurrence, which is subjective for each individual.

Methods and Results

3. What did you do in the experiment?

The experiment asked the participant to observe the appearing alphanumeric characters

and focus/memorize the letter appearing in the sequence in any order. The interstimulus

interval was on four different levels and each level has its difficulty level. There were 40
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trials with the varying position of the first letter followed by the second letter at specified

positioning, i.e. one, three, seven, or no second letter.

4. What are the TYPICAL results (not yours)?

The typical results in the experiment reflect that recognition and processing of the second

letter are compromised when the assigned visual stimulus is at a low interstimulus

interval, i.e. 200ms. The results show that the first target in the visual serial is easily

recognized in almost all varying sequence, however, the recognition of the second letter

in the serial are harder to recognize and depend on an interstimulus interval, i.e. if the

second targeted letter was distanced after the first or seven, it was recognized,

meanwhile, if the distance between the first and second letter was 3, it remained blinked

out or missed.

Discussion

5. Describe why the second letter was not well remembered if it was presented very soon

after the first letter.

The second letter was not well remembered if it was presented very soon after the first

letter because of the “attentional blink”, which refers to the interval between processing

one set of information and getting ready for the second set of information. If the

succession time between the first and second is between 200ms to 500ms, one may not

even perceive the second target, or it could not reach the consciousness to be processed

and recognized, thus the second letter was not well remembered.

6. The lab also discusses a divided attention experiment by Neisser & Becklen. What did

they do in the experiment and what were the results?

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Neisser & Becklen's experiment of dividend attention is designed to explore the effect of

divided attention on performance. The experiment asked the participants to watch two

movies superimposed on the same screen, in two different settings. When the participants

were asked to focus on one movie and ignore the other, selectively attending, they only

missed a few important details. On the contrary when participants were asked to divide

attention between both their performance exacerbated and depreciated eight times.