Dynamics of the attentional blink in preverbal infants.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America March 10, 2026 François Leroy, Shruti Naik, Rasa Gulbinaite et al.
Four-month-old infants can focus attention strongly enough to temporarily miss a subsequent interesting stimulus, a phenomenon called attentional blink that in adults reflects a serial processing bottleneck for conscious access. Infants viewed a central teddy bear followed by a lateralized face at varying delays. They missed the face at the shortest delay (400 ms), detected it at 800 ms only when it appeared in the left visual field, and required 1,200 ms for detection in the right visual field, indicating hemispheric asymmetry. Trial-by-trial measures showed that deeper engagement with the first target predicted missing the second, supporting the presence of a global workspace in early infancy with slower dynamics.