The benefits and costs of temporal attention

Attending to specific moments in time improves the quality of sensory information presented at these moments. Behavioural and neural benefits of temporal orienting have been shown in several contexts, including rhythmic regularities of the presented stimuli, cues informing about the relevance of specific time windows, and evolving probabilities of events occurring over time. However, it is not clear to what extent the effects and mechanisms of temporal attention are shared with other domains of attentional selection. For example, spatial attention not only improves the processing of stimuli presented at the attended location, but also has detrimental effects on processing stimuli presented elsewhere, as compared to neutral baseline conditions. This is exactly the focus of a recent paper by Denison, Heeger and Carrasco, who investigate whether similar perceptual trade-offs characterise temporal attention.

[Link] to the original blog post for Timing Research Forum