Abstract
The attentional blink (AB) and repetition blindness (RB) phenomena refer to subjects' impaired ability to detect the second of two different (AB) or identical (RB) target stimuli in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) stream if they appear within 500 ms of one another. Despite the fact that the AB reveals temporal limits of conscious visual perception, it is at least partly due to limitations at central stages of information processing. Do all forms of time-based attentional limits to conscious perception depend on this central bottleneck? To address this question, we investigated whether RB is affected by online response selection, a cognitive operation that requires central processing. Subjects searched for two target letters presented in RSVP streams containing either digit or computer symbol distractors. Targets were either identical (RB trials) or different (AB trials), and the first target was responded to either as soon as it was detected (speeded condition) or at the end (unspeeded condition) of each stream. The results showed that the AB, but not the RB, is exacerbated under online response conditions. These findings demonstrate that RB is independent of central processing limitations, and imply that attentional limits to conscious perception can occur at multiple stages of information processing.
This research was supported by NSF (#0094992) and NIMH (R01 MH70776) grants to R.M.