Abstract
When participants are asked to recognise two masked stimuli presented within approximately 500ms of each other, the second stimulus often fails to be successfully reported. This phenomenon has been labelled the attentional blink (AB; Raymond, Shapiro & Arnell, 1992), and has been attributed to an inability to deploy attention to the second target when presented in such close temporal proximity to the first. Many studies have examined this phenomenon and it has been shown to be robust not only in the visual domain but in other modalities, such as the auditory domain (Arnell & Jolicoeur, 1999). A new and exciting development in the AB literature suggests this limitation in deployment of temporal attention can be attenuated by adding task irrelevant distraction as participants perform a typical AB task (Olivers & Nieuwenhuis, 2005; Arend, Johnston & Shapiro, submitted). Principally, these initial studies have examined the effect of visual and auditory task irrelevant distraction on a visually presented AB task. Here we present data that examines the generality of this finding by determining whether task irrelevant distraction in the visual and auditory domains can attenuate an AB task in the auditory modality. These data extend present hypotheses regarding the mechanism by which attentional resources are allocated in dual-task paradigms.