La Trobe University, School of Psychological Science, Bundoora Campus, Melbourne, Victoria 3086, Australia.
Brain Cogn. 2012 Mar;78(2):99-104. doi: 10.1016/j.bandc.2011.12.002. Epub 2012 Jan 2.
Visual attention has temporal limitations. In the attentional blink (AB) a stream of stimuli such as letters or digits are presented to a participant on a computer monitor at a rapid rate. Embedded in the stream are two targets that the participant must try to identify. Identification of the second target is severely impaired if it is presented within approximately 500ms of the first target. This is the 'blink' in visual attention. In this study we examined the role of the magnocellular visual pathway in the AB. This fast conducting pathway has high temporal resolution and contrast sensitivity. It is also insensitive to the direction of chromatic contrast, and this attribute was exploited in order to isolate its contributions to temporal attention. Colour defined, luminance noise masked AB streams were compared to AB streams of varying achromatic contrast. The four observers, (2F and 2M) aged between 21 and 35years, had normal visual acuity and colour vision. The colour stimuli produced a similar blink to the moderate contrast achromatic stimuli. This indicates that the magnocellular pathway does not have a privileged role in the attentional blink. We provide an explanation of previous apparently contradictory findings in terms of the role of different types of visual masking in the attentional blink.
视觉注意力具有时间限制。在注意瞬脱（AB）中，一连串的刺激，如字母或数字，以快速的速度呈现在参与者的计算机显示器上。在这些刺激中嵌入了两个目标，参与者必须试图识别。如果第二个目标在大约 500 毫秒内呈现，那么它的识别就会严重受损。这就是视觉注意力的“瞬脱”。在这项研究中，我们研究了大细胞视觉通路在 AB 中的作用。这条快速传导的通路具有高时间分辨率和对比度敏感度。它也不受颜色对比度方向的影响，为了分离其对时间注意力的贡献，我们利用了这一属性。颜色定义、亮度噪声掩蔽 AB 流与不同非彩色对比度的 AB 流进行了比较。四名观察者（2 名女性和 2 名男性）年龄在 21 至 35 岁之间，视力和色觉正常。彩色刺激产生了与中等对比度非彩色刺激相似的瞬脱。这表明大细胞通路在注意瞬脱中没有特权作用。我们根据不同类型的视觉掩蔽在注意瞬脱中的作用，对以前看似矛盾的发现做出了解释。
