Your brain has limited attentional resources. If you have ever tried to focus on multiple things at once, you have likely discovered you could not fully pay attention to all of them. In some cases, you might even notice that some things seem to simply slide past you unnoticed. In one well-known demonstration of attentional blink, a series of letters and numbers are flashed on a screen in a rapid sequence. The viewer is asked to look for a specific pair of items, such as the number 2 and 7 and press a button when they spot the target numbers. In many cases, observers fail to see the second target when it occurs soon after the first one.
Why Does It Occur?
Some experts suggest that the attentional blink serves as a way to help the brain ignore distractions and focus on processing the first target. When an event occurs, the brain needs time to process it before it can move on to the next event. If a second event occurs during this critical processing time, it will simply be missed. There are a few different theories that seek to explain the attentional blink. Inhibition theory suggests that perceptual confusion occurs during the process of identifying targets, resulting in an attention gap. Interference theory posits that when different things competing for our attention, we may end up focusing on the wrong target. Another popular theory is the two-stage processing theory. According to this idea, processing a series of items involves two different stages. The first stage involves noticing the targets, while the second involves actually processing the items so that they can be reported.
Attentional Blink in the Real World
While many of the demonstrations of attentional blink involve rapid serial visual presentations in lab settings, this phenomenon can also influence how you experience events in the real world. While that half-second period might seem very small, critical things can happen that can affect your safety. A deer might leap out into the road. The car in front of you might slam on its brakes. You might even start to drift slightly into the other lane. The attentional blink might be tiny, but it can certainly have serious consequences in real-world settings.
