Attentional blink is an interesting phenomenon first described in 1992. Generally, it's about spotting salient and important items in a rapid sequence of other objects. The specific task that's used in an experiment would be where the subject is looking at a screen, where a bunch of black letters pop up and disappear in sequence. Once in a while, a white letter pops up, and a certain (short) amount of time after the white letter, an X may or may not pop up as well.

So the white letter notifies you that the X might pop up soon. If the X pops up immediately after the white letter does, your percentage of seeing it will be higher than average. This is due to an aspect of attentional blink called "lag one sparing." There's no super conclusive explanation for this, though it's thought that the brain releases a neurotransmitter called norepinephrine after the meaningful stimulus (the white letter), the effects of which last for around 100ms and allow the X to be processed together with the white letter.

However, if the X appears between 0.2 and 0.5 seconds after the white letter, many people miss it. The visual system "blinks" after the relevant white letter stimulus and is blind to the X popping up.

A real-world example of attentional blink would be if you're driving outside, with many objects whizzing past you, and you have to respond quickly to a ball rolling onto the street. As you shift your attention and bring the ball to your conscious awareness, there's a half-second gap in which you might miss a child running out after that ball.

Studies, chiefly those done by Shawn Green during his graduate studies in Daphne Bavelier's lab, have shown that video game players have a much shorter attentional blink than nongame players. This is really interesting because it suggests that these fundamental phenomena are trainable and changeable by playing fast-paced computer games.

Now this is sort of the reciprocal of what people traditionally think of as educational games. Instead of learning material from games, we’re playing games to train our own visual skill, attention, enumeration skill, and so on. So it goes both ways - neuroscience can be used to design better games, and games can also be used to affect our own brains.