Beyond Task 1 difficulty: The duration of T1 encoding modulates the attentional blink

Beyond a mask and against the bottleneck: Retroactive dual-task interference during working memory consolidation of a masked visual target.

“…Furthermore, it also stands to reason that the second target in the attentional blink paradigm-which typically comprises a single letter or a digit that is embedded among distractor stimuli-is much less likely to "breakthrough" the attentional blink and perturb the ongoing consolidation of an earlier target than an unmasked target that appears abruptly on a blank screen and that requires a rapid decision and response. Indeed, it is of interest note that the only study on the attentional blink that found a strong and protracted retroactive interference effect involved a study in which the consolidation load was high (i.e., participants had to recall a string of five digits or letters in the correct order) and in which the second target was highly salient (i.e., the second target also comprised a string of five characters, but it depicted the same letter or digit five times in a row, for example: "EEEEE"; Ouimet & Jolicoeur, 2007). Accordingly, it may be concluded that the reason why studies on the attentional blink typically show little evidence for retroactive interference beyond an SOA of 100 ms lies in the combination of a relatively low consolidation load for the first target and the use of a weak and relatively unobtrusive second target.…”

“…Importantly, this effect has been shown to occur regardless of whether the first target is masked (e.g., Nieuwenstein, Potter, & Theeuwes, 2009) but only if the first target can be recalled (Nieuwenstein, Van der Burg, Theeuwes, Wyble, & Potter, 2009), and it has also been found that the magnitude of the attentional blink is stronger when the amount of to-be-consolidated information is increased for the first target (Olson, Chun, & Anderson, 2001;Ouimet & Jolicoeur, 2007; see also Tombu et al, 2011). Accordingly, theories of the attentional blink generally assume that this effect reflects a consequence of consolidating the first target in memory, thus suggesting that the consolidation of a visual stimulus continues for several hundred milliseconds even after it has been masked (Bowman & Wyble, 2007;Chun & Potter, 1995;Jolicoeur & Dell'Acqua, 1998;Shih, 2008; Taatgen, Juvina, Schippers, Borst, & Martens, 2009;Wyble, Bowman, & Nieuwenstein, 2009;Wyble, Potter, Bowman, & Nieuwenstein, 2011; see also Lagroix, Spalek, Wyble, Jannati, & Di Lollo, 2012).…”

Revisiting the spread of sparing in the attentional blink

“…However, this interference could be more severe when the number of targets within a single episode increases (i.e., when T 1 's memory load is elevated), leading to prolonged T 1 memory encoding, which produces stronger suppression of attention for a longer duration. This may explain why the AB is more severe in the high than in the low T 1 -memory-load situation (Akyürek et al, 2007;Akyürek et al, 2010;Jolicoeur & Dell'Acqua, 1998;Ouimet & Jolicoeur, 2007;Scalf et al, 2011).…”

“…For example, an unreported T 2 is nonetheless processed at a relatively high level-for example, the semantic level-indicating that the bottleneck of identifying a second target during the AB is not located at the perceptual processing stage (Chua, Goh, & Hon, 2001;Luck, Vogel, & Shapiro, 1996;Maki, Frigen, & Paulson, 1997;Shapiro, Driver, Ward, & Sorensen, 1997). Increasing the difficulty of encoding T 1 into working memory by increasing memory load leads to more severe AB on T 2 , indicating that T 2 performance varies as a function of the resource requirement of T 1 processing (Akyürek, Hommel, & Jolicoeur, 2007;Akyürek, Leszczyński, & Schubö, 2010;Jolicoeur & Dell'Acqua, 1998;Ouimet & Jolicoeur, 2007;Scalf, Dux, & Marois, 2011). On the other hand, if the distractor directly following T 1 , which provides backward masking to T 1 and prolongs T 1 processing, is replaced by a brief blank, the report of T 2 shows no (Chun & Potter, 1995;Raymond et al, 1992;Seiffert & Di Lollo, 1997) or little Nieuwenstein, Van der Burg, Theeuwes, Wyble, & Potter, 2009) performance deficit.…”

Concurrency benefits in the attentional blink: Attentional flexibility and shifts of decision criteria

“…However, if we assume that T1 accuracy reflects the efficiency of T1 processing, as recent electrophysiological evidence has shown (Brisson et al, 2010), bottleneck models would predict that an increase in T1 accuracy should be associated with a reduction of the AB. This is because more efficient processing would create a shorter waiting period in which T2 has to wait before being consolidated, in the same way as when the difficulty of active short-term memory processes in the T1 task (Akyürek, Hommel, & Jolicoeur, 2007;Ouimet & Jolicoeur, 2007) or the difficulty of online response selection to T1 (see Jolicoeur, Dell'Acqua, & Crebolder, 1998, 2001, for reviews) is reduced. Note that even small increases in T1 accuracy, of less than 5%, have been associated with a significant attenuation of the AB magnitude (Brisson, Spalek, & Di Lollo, in press).…”