Explain the design of an experiment demonstrating attentional blink.

Explain the design of an experiment demonstrating attentional blink.

If an experiment requires attending to a string of stimuli, e.g. letters, there exist temporal limits to what we can perceive. About 300ms after perceiving a stimulus, an attentional blink occurs, creating a blindspot. Hence, if we attend to a stimulus, we are likely to miss the next one, if it is presented 300ms after the attended one.

Performance decreases in reporting a second piece of information if it appears within a certain period of time after the appearance of a first piece of information

The method used during experiments connected to the attentional blink is called rapid serial visual presentation. As described above it allows the presentation of informaion in a specific manner, namelz word-by-word and in a fixed spatial location. When used for measuring the attentional blink visual stimuli is presented in the aforementioned manner and it has been proved that if a second visual stimuli is presented directly after the first in the time frame of 150-400ms it is usually undetected.