Beyond the Blink: How Task Complexity, Temporal Crowding, and Ensemble Perception Reframe the Debate on Attention and Action

Abstract Rosenholtz’s framework reconciles contradictory findings in ensemble perception by attributing perceptual failures to task complexity and peripheral summary-statistic limitations rather than attentional lapses. This perspective also reframes the attentional blink (AB) as a manifestation of temporal crowding rather than a failure of selective attention. Philosophically, this challenges the idea that attention is constitutive of action, suggesting instead that task constraints shape both perception and agency.