The time course of attention: It's better than we thought.

What is the time course of attention? Research using rapid-stimulus streams has suggested that it is rather slow: Attention takes half a second to recover from processing one thing before it can process the next. This period is referred to as the attentional blink, and it is thought to reflect a fundamental bottleneck in conscious processing. If this period does exist, such a limitation would have severe consequences in real-life situations in which multiple events may rapidly succeed each other (e.g., in traffic). However, findings that support the attentional blink are at odds with other findings indicating that attention is not reduced, but enhanced, following potentially important occurrences. The article reviews evidence that these opposite effects are actually closely related. The attentional blink is a consequence of selection mechanisms that are not severely limited, but have an adaptive function: They enhance perception in response to relevant information but suppress perception in response to irrelevant information. It means that humans are better geared for real life than was previously thought. Copyright, © 2007 Association for Psychological Science

Analysis of outright monetary transactions and public sector purchase programmes - legality and economic reasoning

The main objective of this study was to establish a doctrine on how the OMT and PSPP can be compatible with the TFEU Article 123, which prohibits monetary financing of Member States by the ECB. The second and third objectives were to briefly examine what legal frameworks are practiced in other countries and assess the economic necessity of such programmes and future prospects. The research unravelled the interpretation methods used by the CJEU and established the sufficient safeguards doctrine. The doctrine has two main principles which cannot be violated in the creation of the particular safeguards, and those safeguards ultimately prevent the breach of the TFEU. Economic research made it clear that excessive indebtedness to fund massive public projects would produce hyperinflation and should be avoided. Analysis of major macroeconomic indicators and technical analysis have produced evidence of likely economic contraction in the medium term

On the dissociation between compound and present / absent tasks in visual search: Intertrail priming is ambiguity-driven.

Visual search is speeded when the target-defining property (a feature- or dimension difference relative to the distractors) is repeated relative to when it changes. It is thought that automatic and implicit intertrial priming mechanisms underlie this effect. However, intertrial priming has been found to be less robust in compound search tasks (in which the response property is unrelated to the target-defining property) than in present/absent search tasks (in which the response is directly related to the presence of a target-defining property). This study explored the hypothesis that intertrial priming is dependent on the level of ambiguity in a task, with the present/absent task being inherently more ambiguous than the compound search task. The first three of five experiments further established the dissociation between the tasks and excluded alternative explanations. Intertrial priming was strong in present/absent and go/no-go tasks, but absent in compound and compound/absent tasks. The last two experiments supported the ambiguity hypothesis by introducing more uncertainty in the compound task, after which intertrial priming returned. © 2006 Psychology Press Ltd

A Boost and Bounce theory of temporal attention

What is the time course of visual attention? Attentional blink studies have found that the 2nd of 2 targets is often missed when presented within about 500 ms from the 1st target, resulting in theories about relatively long-lasting capacity limitations or bottlenecks. Earlier studies, however, reported quite the opposite finding: Attention is transiently enhanced, rather than reduced, for several hundreds of milliseconds after a relevant event. The authors present a general theory, as well as a working computational model, that integrate these findings. There is no central role for capacity limitations or bottlenecks. Central is a rapidly responding gating system (or attentional filter) that seeks to enhance relevant and suppress irrelevant information. When items sufficiently match the target description, they elicit transient excitatory feedback activity (a "boost" function), meant to provide access to working memory. However, in the attentional blink task, the distractor after the target is accidentally boosted, resulting in subsequent strong inhibitory feedback response (a "bounce"), which, in effect, closes the gate to working memory. The theory explains many findings that are problematic for limited-capacity accounts, including a new experiment showing that the attentional blink can be postponed. © 2008 American Psychological Association

Using biologically plausible neural models to specify the functional and neural mechanisms of visual search

We review research from our laboratory that attempts to pull apart the functional and neural mechanisms of visual search using converging, inter-disciplinary evidence from experimental studies with normal participants, neuropsychological studies with brain lesioned patients, functional brain imaging and computational modelling. The work suggests that search is determined by excitatory mechanisms that support the selection of target stimuli, and inhibitory mechanisms that suppress irrelevant distractors. These mechanisms operate through separable though overlapping neural circuits which can be functionally decomposed by imposing model-based analyses on brain imaging data. The chapter highlights the need for inter-disciplinary research for understanding complex cognitive processes at several levels

Selecting from dynamic environments: Attention distinghuises between blinking and moving.

Pinto, Olivers, and Theeuwes (2006) showed that a static target can be efficiently found among different types of dynamically changing distractors. They hypothesized that attention employs a broad division between static and dynamic information, a hypothesis that conforms with earlier research. In the present study, we investigated whether attention can only make use of this crude division or can exploit more subtle discriminations within the dynamic domain. In Experiment 1, participants were able to efficiently find a blinking target among moving distractors and moving targets among blinking distractors, although all items changed at the same rate and produced the same change in local luminance. In Experiment 2, search for a dynamic target among dynamic distractors was aided when we gave the distractors additional dynamic cues. Experiment 3 showed that making the displays equiluminant affected search efficiency for a static target among moving distractors, but not among blinking distractors. The findings refute the broad division hypothesis and suggest that object continuity plays an important role in selection. Copyright 2008 Psychonomic Society, Inc

When is search for a static target among dynamic distractors efficient?

Intuitively, dynamic visual stimuli, such as moving objects or flashing lights, attract attention. Visual search tasks have revealed that dynamic targets among static distractors can indeed efficiently guide attention. The present study shows that the reverse case, a static target among dynamic distractors, allows for relatively efficient selection in certain but not all cases. A static target was relatively efficiently found among distractors that featured apparent motion, corroborating earlier findings. The important new finding was that static targets were equally easily found among distractors that blinked on and off continuously, even when each individual item blinked at a random rate. However, search for a static target was less efficient when distractors abruptly varied in luminance but did not completely disappear. The authors suggest that the division into the parvocellular pathway dealing with static visual information, on the one hand, and the magnocellular pathway common to motion and new object onset detection, on the other hand, allows for efficient filtering of dynamic and static information

Static items are automatically prioritized in a dynamic environment.

Everyday experience provides us with the intuition that dynamic events guide or capture attention - something which has been confirmed in experimental studies. Recently, we showed that there are limitations to the extent to which dynamic items attract attention. In a visual search task where all items, except one, were dynamic, the dynamic items could be ignored and the static item could be efficiently detected. In the present study we investigated whether attention is automatically drawn to the static item. Three visual search experiments, in which the target and the static object were uncorrelated, revealed that the static item was nevertheless prioritized. This result is at odds with some of the current theories on attentional capture, including the "new object" hypothesis. The current study suggests that differences in dynamics, rather than dynamic features per se, determine where attention is allocated