Abstract
Our ability to attend to successive events is severely limited: observers often fail to report the second of two targets that appear within 200-500ms from each other, a phenomenon known as the attentional blink. Here, we examined what processes are disrupted during the blink. Specifically, we examined whether the blink affects (1) the ability of a distractor that matches the attentional set to capture attention and initiate an attentional episode and (2) attentional engagement in this distractor, that is, the extraction of its response-relevant features. We found that attentional capture occurs irrespective of whether the attention-grabbing distractor occurs during or outside the blink, but that attention is engaged in the object that immediately follows this distractor in time. Taken together, these findings strongly support the Delayed Engagement Account of the attentional blink as well as demonstrate that attentional capture and attentional engagement can be dissociated.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2015