Abstract:

The attentional blink (AB) effect refers to the phenomenon of when participants exhibit an impaired ability to report a second target (T2) which appears within the time window of 200~500 ms after a first target (T1) within a stream of distractors. Recently, there has been a growing interest in investigating individual differences in the AB effect. The present paper firstly reviews recent studies which have explored individual differences in the AB effect from the cognitive, emotional, and personality perspectives. These differences have mainly been found to be embodied in working memory, the ability to inhibit distractors, dispositional focus, and personality. Recently, the individual differences in the AB effect have been highlighted in both clinical research and in terms of practical applications. Finally, we propose a new direction for research into the underlying of neural mechanism in the individual differences and the practical application.

Key words: attentional blink, individual differences, special participants