Abstract
Attentional blink (AB) refers to the phenomenon where conscious report for the second target (T2) following the first target (T1), both embedded in a stream of items under rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP), becomes difficult if T2 follows no later than 500 ms after T1. The present study examined the influence of T1 visibility on T2 AB strength according to the bottleneck account, which proposes that the amount of allocated resources for T1 processing determines the strength of AB against T2. Experiment 1 used a multiple-RSVP method displaying four single-RSVP streams simultaneously at four fixed locations. T1 visibility was manipulated by lowering the luminance contrast between T1 and the gray background. In the high-visibility condition, T1 was shown in black to create a higher contrast against the gray background; whereas in the low-visibility condition, T1 was shown in dim gray to create a lower contrast against the background. Experiment 2 used the same stimuli and procedure as Experiment 1 but replaced the letter distractors with "#" signs. In both experiments, we found that T2 identification accuracy was higher in the high-visibility T1 than low-visibility T1 condition, indicating that stronger AB was present for the low-visibility T1 than the high-visibility T1. The results suggest that lowering T1 visibility exacerbated by target location uncertainty demands greater attentional resources for T1 and therefore creates a consolidation bottleneck against T2, where T2 identification suffers from a lack of resources necessary for T2 processing.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2017