Our ability to perceive two events in close temporal succession is severely limited, a phenomenon known as the attentional blink. While the blink has served as a popular tool to prevent conscious perception, there is less research on its causes, and in particular on the role of conscious perception of the first event in triggering it. In three experiments, we disentangled the roles of spatial attention, conscious perception and working memory (WM) in causing the blink. We show that while allocating spatial attention to T1 is neither necessary nor sufficient for eliciting a blink, consciously perceiving it is necessary but not sufficient. When T1 was task irrelevant, consciously perceiving it triggered a blink only when it matched the attentional set for T2. We conclude that consciously perceiving a task-relevant event causes the blink, possibly because it triggers encoding of this event into WM. We discuss the implications of these findings for the relationship between spatial attention, conscious perception and WM, as well as for the distinction between access and phenomenal consciousness.

我们感知时间上连续发生的两个事件的能力受到严重限制，这种现象被称为注意眨眼。虽然眨眼已成为防止有意识知觉的流行工具，但对其原因的研究较少，特别是关于第一个事件的有意识知觉在触发它时的作用。在三个实验中，我们解开了空间注意力、意识知觉和工作记忆 (WM) 在引起眨眼中的作用。我们表明，虽然将空间注意力分配给 T1 对引起眨眼既不必要也不充分，但有意识地感知它是必要但不充分的。当 T1 与任务无关时，只有当它与 T2 的注意力集相匹配时，有意识地感知它才会触发眨眼。我们得出的结论是，有意识地感知与任务相关的事件会导致眨眼，可能是因为它触发了将此事件编码到 WM 中。我们讨论了这些发现对空间注意力、有意识的感知和 WM 之间的关系以及通路和现象意识之间的区别的影响。