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Experimental psychology

In a blink of the mind's eye

Nature volume 387, pages 756–757 (1997)Cite this article

Imagine a stream of characters appearing, one at a time, on a computer screen at a rate of about eight per second: P-D-E-X-G-4-F-K. You can read characters at this rate — if asked, you could successfully push a button when you saw a 4. But if you were asked to report on Xs and 4s, you would fail miserably: specifically, you would be unable to respond to the 4 when it appeared, a quarter of a second after the X. Something about the extra attention that is given to the X makes it very hard to respond to other items for the next several hundred milliseconds. Known as the ‘attentional blink’1,2, this is one of the more interesting attentional phenomena to have been described in recent years.

Two papers in this issue offer new insight into what is and is not possible during an attentional blink. Joseph et al.3 (page 805) find that attentional blink makes it impossible to perform some very easy visual tasks that were thought not to require attention. In contrast, Duncan et al.4 (page 808) show that a blink of the mind's eye does not produce a blink of the mind's ear, and vice versa. Both of these results provide new information about attentional blink, but they are more valuable for the broader light that they shed on conscious visual experience (in the paper by Joseph et al.), and on the nature of attention (in the case of the paper by Duncan et al.).

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Figure 1

NATIONAL TRUST, PETWORTH HOUSE/BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY, LONDON

Figure 2: Suppose you were asked to respond to events one and two in a stream of stimuli.

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  1. Center for Ophthalmic Research, Brigham and Womens Hospital, 221 Longwood Avenue, Boston, 02115, Massachusetts, USA

    Jeremy M. Wolfe

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  1. Jeremy M. Wolfe
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Wolfe, J. In a blink of the mind's eye. Nature 387, 756–757 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1038/42807

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