Abstract
When certain stimuli are associated with reward, they develop attentional priority and capture attention. Additionally, Theeuwes, Belopolsky, and Van der Burg (2012) showed at VSS last year that highly rewarded stimuli have a modest temporal processing enhancement. The current project explored the temporal dynamics of attentional prioritization within the context of an attentional blink (AB) paradigm. Participants took part in both a training phase and a test phase. During the training phase, the colors red and green were rewarded with points and sound effects, an established paradigm that produces attentional capture for rewarded colors (Miranda & Palmer, 2012). During the test phase, participants took part in an AB task in which they were asked to identify two colored letter targets, T1 and T2, in a stream of 20 otherwise white letters. One third of the T1 letters had previously been associated with high reward, one third had been associated with low reward, and one third had not been associated with reward. No T2 letter colors were previously associated with reward. We hypothesized that highly rewarded colors presented at T1 would reduce the AB magnitude for T2 items due to faster processing of stimuli with attentional priority. We observed a robust AB, though there were no significant differences in the time course of T2 detection accuracy (given T1 correct) between the three reward conditions. However, there were reliable differences in accuracy of identifying T1. T1 accuracy was significantly higher for colors associated with both high and low reward compared to colors not previously associated with reward. Following Chun & Potter’s (1995) AB model, this indicates that attentional prioritization of T1 items may not move them through the attentional bottleneck fast enough to alleviate the AB for T2 items. We are currently investigating the effects of rewarded T2 colors on the AB.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2013