Transient attention

Research using Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) suggests that visual targets can be rapidly detected.  When a target is spotted, a temporal window of attention to encode that target stimulus into memory. The time course of this transient attentional enhancement is about 150 milliseconds, so it is possible for a following stimulus to benefit from the attention deployed to an earlier one.  This is demonstrated in the following paper





Attentional blink

The term attentional blink describes the finding that it is hard to see two stimuli in rapid succession (about 200-400 milliseconds apart).   Under these circumstances, it seems as if our attentional system “blinks” and a target that is plainly visible to the eye goes undetected by the mind.  However, when two targets are presented more closely in time, it is quite easy to see both of them, a puzzling phenomenon known as lag-1 sparing. 


Conceptual short term memory (CSTM)

A memory system dedicated for the task of briefly representing concepts and ideas may underlie our surprising ability to keep pace with blazingly fast RSVP streams, extracting not just target images, but also constructing, on the fly, lexically and semantically structured representations of scenes, sentences, or entire paragraphs.  This form of information representation is quite different from working memory in that it is extremely fast; CSTM processing can keep pace with a 10/sec presentation rate, which is faster than the pace of encoding discrete items into working memory processing.  Furthermore, the bulk of CSTM processing seems to exist below the level of conscious access, and only the results of the computations are registered into a consciously accessible form. 


In close collaboration with Mary Potter and her lab at MIT, we are in the process of constructing a comprehensive test battery to assess CSTM function for use in cognitive research and in aid of diagnosing and understanding cognitive disorders.




Working memory

Another focus of recent research is to understand the time course during which a visual stimulus is rendered into a consciously accessible mental representation, and how we encode the temporal order of multiple, rapidly presented stimuli.  This work combines computational neuroscience with electrophysiology. 


A major focus of our modelling effort is to simulate and understand these dynamics of attention, which occur at time scales of less than a second and give rise to several prominent cognitive phenomena such as the attentional blink, repetition blindness, attentional capture and transient attention.



Bowman H., & Wyble B. (2007) The simultaneous type, serial token model of temporal attention and working memory. Psychological Review, 114(1):38-70.

Wyble B., Bowman H., & Nieuwenstein M. (2009) The Attentional Blink provides Episodic Distinctiveness: Sparing at a Cost Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance. 35(2):324-37

Craston, P.,  Wyble, B., Chennu, S., and Bowman H., (2009) The attentional blink reveals serial working memory encoding: Evidence from virtual & human event-related potentials.  Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 21(3):550-566.

Mary Potter’s website

Potter, M.C. (1993). Very short-term conceptual memory. Memory & Cognition, 21, 156-161.

The overall goal of our work is to understand the temporal dynamics of the cognitive processes that allows us to see a visual stimulus. 

Wyble B, Bowman H, & Potter M. (2009). Categorically Defined Targets Trigger Spatiotemporal Attention. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance.35(3):787-807

Visualizing the temporal dynamics of the model

Attentional Blink Demo

Scholarpedia CSTM entry

Scholarpedia attentional blink entry