A moving overlay shrinks the attentional blink.

Abstract

This report describes a study examining the effects of overlaying a veil of spots on the letters in a central rapid serial visual presentation stream. Observers identified two target letters (T1 and T2, respectively) embedded in a stream of distractor letters printed in a different color. In Experiment 1, the attentional blink (AB) diminished when a different overlay veiled each letter, such that the spots appeared to move as the letters changed. Experiment 2 concerned whether the performance enhancement occurred because the overlay hampered processing of the lag1 distractor, thus weakening the distractor's interference with T1. Experiment 3 focused on how changing the overlay at or around T1 affected the AB. The attention disengagement hypothesis was proposed to explain the common theme in the results-that performance was only enhanced when different overlays were applied to the T1 and lag1 frames. The claim is that the AB reflects a failure of prompt attentional disengagement from T1, which, in turn, delays reengagement when T2 appears shortly thereafter. When T1's disappearance is accompanied by an overlay change, the perceptual system gets an additional cue signaling that the visual scene has changed, thereby inducing attentional disengagement. Apart from facilitating prompt reengagement at the next target, earlier disengagement also improves target recovery by excluding features of the trailing item, likely to be a distractor, from working memory.