BLINK is a prototype of an in-memory based query processor that exploits heavily the underlying CPU infrastructure. It is very sensitive to the processor’s caches and instruction set. In this paper, we describe how to close two major functional gaps in BLINK, which arise from real-world workloads. The manipulation of the data maintained by BLINK require specialized data structures. Another aspe...

In the above-referenced article, we reported that microsaccade directions do not predict the directionality of illusory brightness changes of overlapping transparent surfaces. While our results and conclusions remain the same, there was a methodological error that requires correction. We used the SRresearch Eyelink2 algorithm to identify microsaccades, but because of an error that was not disco...

We present a system that simultaneously tracks eyes and detects eye blinks. Two interactive particle filters are used for this purpose, one for the closed eyes and the other one for the open eyes. Each particle filter is used to track the eye locations as well as the scales of the eye subjects. The set of particles that gives higher confidence is defined as the primary set and the other one is ...

Humans have difficulty processing more than one event at a time, as is evidenced by the attentional blink ('blink') phenomenon: the second of two targets in a visual stream of events cannot be reported accurately if it appears between 100 and 500 ms after the first. By using whole-head magnetoencephalography, we show that the probability of behaviourally failing to correctly identify the second...

It is widely assumed that high-level visual processes subserve the attentional blink (AB). Recent evidence from studies of visual masking during the AB that were designed to directly test the contributions of high-level masking effects, however, have failed to provide empirical support for this position. The implication is that low-level visual processes are crucial to the AB. We tested this id...

The identification of the second of two targets presented in close succession is often impaired--a phenomenon referred to as the attentional blink. Extending earlier work (Di Lollo, Kawahara, Ghorashi, and Enns, in Psychological Research 69:191-200, 2005), the present study shows that increasing the number of targets in the stream can lead to remarkable improvements as long as there are no inte...

An important question in the study of language is to what degree semantic and syntactic processes are automatic or controlled. This study employed an attentional blink (AB) paradigm to manipulate awareness in the processing of target words in order to assess automaticity in semantic and syntactic processing. In the semantic block, targets occurring both within and outside the AB period elicited...

Identification of the second of two targets is impaired when presented less than about 500 ms after the first. The magnitude of this attentional blink (AB) is known to be modulated by tonic factors (e.g., observer's state of relaxation). The present work examined the effects of a phasic change in observer's state brought about by an alerting stimulus (an aggregate of faint rings) presented in t...

Studies have shown that the attentional blink (AB) effect is diminished for intrinsically salient T2 stimuli, such as arousing, familiar, personally relevant words, or stimuli with salient lowlevel visual features. We examined whether the AB is diminished also for stimuli that do not have special inherent properties but are made salient by the context. One such contextual factor is the coherenc...

When two targets are displayed in rapid visual sequence and masked by trailing patterns, identification accuracy is nearly perfect for the first target but follows a U-shaped pattern over temporal lag for the second target. Three experiments examined the role of visual masking in this attentional blink. Experiment 1 compared integration and interruption masks for both targets. Although either m...