Turning the attentional blink on and off: Opposing effects of spatial and temporal noise

Brain oscillations in various frequency bands have been shown to be an important means of enabling interarea communication for high-level cognitive performance. Interestingly, perturbation to such oscillations in the form of weak noise has been shown to benefit perception in tasks such as the attentional blink (AB). Here, we investigated perturbation intrinsic to the AB task in two conditions in which noise arose from either temporal or spatial discontinuity. Consistent with theoretical predictions, temporal discontinuity resulted in a reduced AB, whereas spatial discontinuity resulted in an increased AB. The results are discussed in the framework of both stochastic resonance theory and pretarget alpha oscillations, two neurally based accounts of perceptual processing.