Your eyes see things that your brain simply forgets to 'save' to your memory a millisecond later.
April 14, 2026
Original Paper
Resolving the Attentional Bottleneck: Cross-Modal Representational Alignment Reveals Late-Stage Working Memory Consolidation
PsyArXiv · eu659_v1
The Takeaway
The 'attentional blink' isn't a failure of sight, but a failure of the brain's fronto-parietal network to consolidate a perception into working memory. This proves we are often consciously blind to things that our visual systems captured perfectly.
From the abstract
The attentional blink reveals the severe capacity limits of conscious human processing, yet whether this bottleneck arises from early perceptual decay or late-stage consolidation failure remains highly debated. To disentangle these psychological stages, the present study employed causally silenced cross-modal representational similarity analysis (EEG-fMRI RSA) to trace the fine-grained spatiotemporal information flow of target processing. Our results revealed a striking spatiotemporal double dis