Behavioural and electrophysiological investigations of the attentional blink

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In our everyday lives we must often perform two tasks at once, or attend to more than one stimulus at a time. For example, we may talk on our cellular phone while driving, or take notes while listening to a lecture. Many of the tasks we try to perform in combination require attention. At odds with our desire to do everything at once is the fact that there are finite limits on how much information we can attend to and process at any one time. Such attentional limitations are frustrating in that they often predict the imminent failure of one or more tasks under conditions of multi-tasking even when two tasks do not share the same input (e.g., eyes) or output (e.g., hands) systems. However, our failures in multi-task situations can provide valuable information concerning functional and fundamental human processing limitations on attention.