Evidence on the ssvep account of pre-target differences in EEG alpha activity in the attentional blink
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1
Carl von Ossietzky University, Germany
The attentional blink (AB) is a deficit in detecting the second of two targets (T1, T2) if T1 and T2 are presented in a rapid stream of distractors within 200-500 ms of one another. Previous research suggests that missing T2 is related to an increase in EEG alpha activity well before the presentation of T1, yet the design of these studies does not allow differentiating whether this is related to a modulation of intrinsically generated alpha activity or a modulation of the steady state visual evoked potential (ssVEP) induced by the rapid stimulus stream. The latter would be indicative of too much attention being paid to the distractor stream in T2 miss trials. This interpretation would be supported if experimentally manipulating the attentional resources drawn by the distractor stream affects the AB. This was tested in the present study. The first experiment (n = 14) consisted of three conditions: a skeletal AB paradigm (only T1, T2, T1+1, T2+1 stimuli; no distactors), various meaningless stimuli as distractors, and numbers as distractors. Targets were letters. As expected, the AB deficit was significantly smallest in the skeletal condition. However, the two other conditions did not differ from one another. A second experiment (n = 10) was run in which instead of various meaningless stimuli the same meaningless stimulus was used repeatedly in the meaningless distractor condition. T2 performance was similar now to the skeletal condition and significantly different from the number distractor condition. This suggests that if distractors capture attention the AB increases, even if distractors are highly dissimilar to the targets and supports the idea that enhanced pre-target alpha activity in the AB reflects an overinvestment of attentional resources to the distractor stream. Funding: This research was supported by a grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft to CK (KR 3433/2-1).
Keywords:
Attention,
Awareness
Conference:
XI International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON XI), Palma, Mallorca, Spain, 25 Sep - 29 Sep, 2011.
Presentation Type:
Poster Presentation
Topic:
Poster Sessions: Consciousness and Awareness
Citation:
Janson
J,
Thorne
JD and
Kranczioch
C
(2011). Evidence on the ssvep account of pre-target differences in EEG alpha activity in the attentional blink.
Conference Abstract:
XI International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON XI).
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2011.207.00548
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Received:
15 Nov 2011;
Published Online:
28 Nov 2011.
*
Correspondence:
Dr. Jolanda Janson, Carl von Ossietzky University, Oldenburg, Germany, jolanda.janson@uni-oldenburg.de