Temporal fluctuations of attention can influence performance of cognitive tasks substantially. A common paradigm to investigate temporal fluctuations of attention is the attentional blink paradigm. Kranczioch and Thorne (2013) report new evidence for the impact of auditory stimuli on the visual attentional blink in the current issue of Advances in Cognitive Psychology.

Classical theories of automaticity assume that automatic processes elicited by unconscious stimuli are autonomous and independent of higher-level cognitive influences. In contrast to these classical conceptions, we argue that automatic processing depends on attentional amplification of task-congruent processing pathways and propose an attentional sensitization model of unconscious visual proces...

We investigated whether a failure of distractor inhibition contributes to the magnitude of the attentional blink (AB). Subjects viewed dual-target rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) streams, where the distractors that directly preceded and succeeded Target 2 (T2-1, T2+ 1) were either identical to each other or different. Previously, Dux, Coltheart, and Harris (2006) found enhanced target r...

OBJECTIVE Given the growing concern that children in today's industrialized and technologically advanced society are becoming more sedentary and less fit, a greater understanding of the extent to which aerobic fitness relates to brain health and cognition during development is of increasing importance. Accordingly, this study sought to use neuroelectric and behavioral measures during an attenti...

The double-Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) problem, in which excessive precipitation is produced in the Southern Hemisphere tropics, which resembles a Southern Hemisphere counterpart to the strong Northern Hemisphere ITCZ, is perhaps the most significant and most persistent bias of global climate models. In this study, we look to the extratropics for possible causes of the double-ITCZ pro...

Simultanagnosia is a disorder of visual attention resulting from bilateral parieto-occipital lesions. Healthy individuals look at eyes to infer people's attentional states, but simultanagnosics allocate abnormally few fixations to eyes in scenes. It is unclear why simultanagnosics fail to fixate eyes, but it might reflect that they are (a) unable to locate and fixate them, or (b) do not priorit...

Substance-dependent patients automatically and involuntarily allocate their attention to drug cues in the environment, a process referred to as attentional bias. Attentional bias is increased during periods of subjective craving and predictive of treatment outcome and relapse in substance dependence. Despite recent theoretical and clinical advances with regard to attentional bias, the underlyin...

Humans constantly process and integrate sensory input from multiple sensory modalities. However, the amount of input that can be processed is constrained by limited attentional resources. A matter of ongoing debate is whether attentional resources are shared across sensory modalities, and whether multisensory integration is dependent on attentional resources. Previous research suggested that th...