Experimental psychology - In a blink of the mind's eye

We often use the term ‘attention’ colloquially, as in to “pay attention”. But attention need not necessarily be a singular entity - while reading this page you could attend to another visual stimulus without moving your eyes. Two new papers have studied one facet of attention, known as ‘attentional blink’, whereby you cannot attend to two stimuli if they occur within a certain time of each other. They show that attentional blink makes it impossible to perform some easy visual tasks that were thought not to require attention.