Attentional Blink In Space And Time Lab Report

Replicating Attentional Blink in Space and Time

The purpose of our experiment was to replicate the experiment presented by Kritjansson and Nakayama on “The attentional blink in space and time” and analyze if the results found correlated to those previously established. The original experiment intended to demonstrate that there is an area around the center of attention where attentional resolution is substandard, even worse than in places at greater distance from the attended one. The experimenters also introduced the idea that this effect might occur because of lateral inhibition of neurons which are responsible for the response to the area around the attended site. Our replication experiment consisted in a simultaneous stream of seven letters in which two target digits (T1 &T2 ) were presented. The

The device used for the conduction of this experiment was a desktop computer with a 14.1 inch screen and a 1024x768 resolution, it was also necessary to use a standard keyboard. The program used to run the experiment was Psychopy 4.85 which used the code generated in R studio by previous students. Gray capitals letter were used as distractors and the two target digits (T1 &T2) were a white color. The stimuli were presented in a black background in the form of a circle after a fixation point made its appearance.

The instructions to the experiment appeared in the first screen and described the participants task , after reading and understanding the instructions the participants were prompted to press the space bar and start the trials. The task consisted of identifying T1 and T2 in a stream of seven letter placed on the form of a circle which were presented in different frames because T1 and T2 had a lag between their presentations. The digits were only presented in temporal positions between 13 and 25 and the lag between T1 and T2 ranged from one to six frames. The experiment was comprised of 96