Abstract
The Attentional Blink (AB) is a well-known RSVP paradigm in which two visual targets (T1 and T2) are embedded in a stream a distractors. In this paradigm, performance on T2 is largely impaired when it appears briefly after T1 (i.e. within 200-500ms). This paradigm is thought to reveal the time course of attention. An important feature of the AB paradigm concerns the necessity of a light masking of the two targets. Thus, although the classical interpretation of the AB effect refers to the limited capacity of attentional resources, this interpretation is not straightforward since masking T2 also contributes to its impaired visibility. Here, by contrast, we demonstrate that while the masking of T2 is necessary in a standard AB task, such a condition is no longer necessary when T2 is a gabor patch at threshold. Indeed, we reasoned that having T2 at threshold would maximize the probability of an AB effect without masking. These results support a clear capacity limited account of the AB effect without relying on masking and call for more consideration of the role of temporal attention in theories of the AB.