Measuring and modeling attentional dwell time

Attentional dwell time (AD) defines our inability to perceive spatially separate events when they occur in rapid succession. In the standard AD paradigm, subjects should identify two target stimuli presented briefly at different peripheral locations with a varied stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA). The AD effect is seen as a long-lasting impediment in reporting the second target, culminating at SOAs of 200–500 ms. Here, we present the first quantitative computational model of the effect—a theory of temporal visual attention. The model is based on the neural theory of visual attention (Bundesen, Habekost, & Kyllingsbæk, Psychological Review, 112, 291–328 2005) and introduces the novel assumption that a stimulus retained in visual short-term memory takes up visual processing-resources used to encode stimuli into memory. Resources are thus locked and cannot process subsequent stimuli until the stimulus in memory has been recoded, which explains the long-lasting AD effect. The model is used to explain results from two experiments providing detailed individual data from both a standard AD paradigm and an extension with varied exposure duration of the target stimuli. Finally, we discuss new predictions by the model.

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