Abstract
Although it is difficult for humans to sustain their attention to visual events, the temporal cueing of a critical event transiently elicits visual attention. However, it is still unknown whether the temporal cuing facilitates reorienting of attention between a pair of visual events, or not. Many studies show that it is difficult for human to reorient their visual attention from a previous target (T1) to a following target (T2) when the temporal lag between T1 and T2 is within about 500 ms (the attentional blink: AB). In this study, I investigated whether the temporal cueing attenuates the AB when observers had to pay attention sustainably to visual stimuli for about 14 minutes. For this purpose, I used a continuous rapid serial visual presentation (cRSVP), in which 200 pairs of T1 and T2 were embedded in a stream of thousands of distractors. Targets were arrows and distractors were random octagons. Each stimulus was presented for 150 ms. The observers were asked to detect the arrows and press the corresponding key as soon as possible. There were two experimental factors. The first factor was the temporal lag between T1 and T2 (1, 2, 5, or 10). The second factor was the temporal cueing of the onset of T1, which was given as a blank in the cRSPV stream. The conditions of the cueing factor were designed as a length of the blank (150 ms, 600 ms, or 0 ms). The results of the experiment showed that the AB was significantly attenuated in the condition in which the blank was 600 ms than the blank was 0 ms. These results suggest that a visually clear blank appeared during engagement in the sustained attention task can work as the temporal cueing of the visual events and facilitate to reorient visual attention.