Abstract
The present study investigated how the attentional blink (AB) interacts with the object-based attention by presenting four RSVP streams on four ends of two rectangles, to ask a question that T2 performance would benefit (e.g. Egly, Driver, & Rafal, 1994) or suffer (Conci & Müller, 2009) from its occurrence on the same object as T1. Essentially replicating the paradigm of Conci and Müller (2009), a same-object cost within the AB period (lag 3) was replicated in Experiment 1 in which the background rectangles and RSVP streams were presented at the same time. However, either longer interval (1 second) between the onsets of rectangles and RSVP streams (Experiments 2) or lower task demand of searching among four replicated letters within each frame of RSVP displays before T1 (Experiment 3) produced a same-object advantage within the AB period (lag 3). Experiment 4 presented T1 on the early (2nd or 3rd) and late (13th or 14th) temporal positions in a random order, and also at lag 3, obtained a same-object cost with early T1 positions, and a same-object advantage with late T1 positions. According to these results, we proposed that, if the operation of opening object file and T1 processing are overlapping, this overlap of two resources-consuming processes would deteriorate the depletion of resources within the same object, resulting in a same object cost in the AB; however, if the object file is well established before T1 processing, T1 could serve as a cue to facilitate T2 performance within the same object, resulting in a same object advantage in the AB. This study extended our view of the AB across objects, and provided theoretical implications concerning the limited-capacity of human brain.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2012