TY - JOUR

T1 - Decomposing the Attentional Blink

AU - Petersen, Anders

AU - Vangkilde, Signe

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2022. American Psychological Association

PY - 2022

Y1 - 2022

N2 - The Attentional Blink (AB) refers to a deficit in reporting a second target (T2) embedded in a stream of distractors when presented 200–500 ms after a preceding target (T1). Several theories about the origin of the AB have been proposed; filter-based theories claim that the AB is the result of a temporarily closing of an attentional gate to avoid featural confusion for targets and distractors, while bottleneck theories propose that the AB is caused by a reduction in the capacity to either encode into or maintain information in visual short-term memory. In three experiments, we systematically vary the exposure duration and composition of the T2 display allowing us to decompose the T2 deficit into well-established parameter estimates based on the Theory of Visual Attention (TVA). As the different AB theories make specific predictions regarding which parameters should be affected during the AB, we are able to test their plausibility. All three experiments consistently show a lower capacity to process T2 during the AB, supporting theories hypothesizing a bottleneck at the encoding stage. No evidence is found supporting filter-based theories or theories placing the bottleneck at the maintenance stage

AB - The Attentional Blink (AB) refers to a deficit in reporting a second target (T2) embedded in a stream of distractors when presented 200–500 ms after a preceding target (T1). Several theories about the origin of the AB have been proposed; filter-based theories claim that the AB is the result of a temporarily closing of an attentional gate to avoid featural confusion for targets and distractors, while bottleneck theories propose that the AB is caused by a reduction in the capacity to either encode into or maintain information in visual short-term memory. In three experiments, we systematically vary the exposure duration and composition of the T2 display allowing us to decompose the T2 deficit into well-established parameter estimates based on the Theory of Visual Attention (TVA). As the different AB theories make specific predictions regarding which parameters should be affected during the AB, we are able to test their plausibility. All three experiments consistently show a lower capacity to process T2 during the AB, supporting theories hypothesizing a bottleneck at the encoding stage. No evidence is found supporting filter-based theories or theories placing the bottleneck at the maintenance stage

KW - Attentional blink

KW - Computational modeling

KW - Temporal visual attention

KW - Theory of visual attention

KW - Visual processing capacity

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85133134483&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1037/xhp0001018

DO - 10.1037/xhp0001018

M3 - Journal article

C2 - 35708934

AN - SCOPUS:85133134483

VL - 48

SP - 812

EP - 823

JO - Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance

JF - Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance

SN - 0096-1523

IS - 8

ER -