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The cost of attending to a visual event can be the failure to consciously detect other events. This processing limitation is well illustrated by the attentional blink paradigm, in which searching for and attending to a target presented in a rapid serial visual presentation stream of distractors can impair one's ability to detect a second target presented soon thereafter. The attentional blink critically depends on'top-down'attentional settings, for it does not occur if participants are asked to ignore the first target. Here we show that'bottom-up'attention can also lead to a profound but ephemeral deficit in conscious perception: Presentation of a novel, unexpected, and task-irrelevant stimulus virtually abolishes conscious detection of a target presented within half a second after the'Surprise'stimulus, but only for its earliest occurrences (generally 1 to 2 presentations). This powerful but short-lived deficit contrasts with a milder but more …