Your Brain 'Blinks' When Your Attention Shifts, Researchers Discover (vanderbilt.edu)

Science_afficionado quotes Vanderbilt University's Research News: When your attention shifts from one place to another, your brain blinks. The blinks are momentary unconscious gaps in visual perception and came as a surprise to the team of Vanderbilt psychologists who discovered the phenomenon while studying the benefits of attention... The research was conducted with macaque monkeys that were trained to shift their attention among different objects on a display screen while the researchers monitored the pattern of neuron activity taking place in their brains... By combining advanced recording techniques that simultaneously track large numbers of neurons with sophisticated computational analyses, the researchers discovered that the activity of the neurons in the visual cortex were momentarily disrupted when the game required the animals to shift their attention. They also traced the source of the disruptions to parts of the brain involved in guiding attention, not back to the eyes.

Comments

Re:Godel, Esher and Bach

[hey!]

From the article:

Primates are particularly suited for the study because they can shift their attention without moving their eyes. Most animals do not have this ability.

Saccadic masking occurs during eye movement, so this is a different phenomenon; or perhaps it is the same phenomenon but it turns out that eye movement isn't really the triggering condition.