School of Social Sciences, Brunel University, Uxbridge, UK.
J Cogn Neurosci. 2012 Jan;24(1):28-38. doi: 10.1162/jocn_a_00054. Epub 2011 May 13.
If two centrally presented visual stimuli occur within approximately half a second of each other, the second target often fails to be reported correctly. This effect, called the attentional blink (AB; Raymond, J. E., Shapiro, K. L., & Arnell, K. M. Temporary suppression of visual processing in an RSVP task: An attentional blink? Journal of Experimental Psychology, Human Perception and Performance, 18, 849-860, 1992], has been attributed to a resource "bottleneck," likely arising as a failure of attention during encoding into or retrieval from visual working memory (WM). Here we present participants with a hybrid WM-AB study while they undergo fMRI to provide insight into the neural underpinnings of this bottleneck. Consistent with a WM-based bottleneck account, fronto-parietal brain areas exhibited a WM load-dependent modulation of neural responses during the AB task. These results are consistent with the view that WM and attention share a capacity-limited resource and provide insight into the neural structures that underlie resource allocation in tasks requiring joint use of WM and attention.
如果两个中央呈现的视觉刺激在彼此大约半秒内出现，第二个目标通常会无法被正确报告。这种效应被称为注意瞬脱（AB；雷蒙德，J. E.，夏皮罗，K. L.，&阿内尔，K. M. 在 RSVP 任务中暂时抑制视觉处理：注意瞬脱？实验心理学杂志：人类感知与绩效，18，849-860，1992]，归因于资源“瓶颈”，可能是由于在将信息编码到视觉工作记忆（WM）中或从 WM 中检索信息时注意力失败。在这里，我们在参与者进行 fMRI 的同时进行了混合 WM-AB 研究，以深入了解该瓶颈的神经基础。与基于 WM 的瓶颈理论一致，额顶叶大脑区域在 AB 任务中表现出与 WM 负荷相关的神经反应调制。这些结果与 WM 和注意力共享一个容量有限的资源的观点一致，并为需要联合使用 WM 和注意力的任务中的资源分配提供了神经结构的见解。
