A quick mind with letters can be a slow mind with natural scenes: Individual differences in attentional selection

Abstract

Background: Most people show a remarkable deficit in reporting the second of two targets (T2) when presented 200- 500 ms after the first (T1), reflecting an 'attentional blink' (AB). However, there are large individual differences in the magnitude of the effect, with some people, referred to as 'non-blinkers', showing no such attentional restrictions. Methodology/Principal Findings: Here we replicate these individual differences in a task requiring identification of two letters amongst digits, and show that the observed differences in T2 performance cannot be attributed to individual differences in T1 performance. In a second experiment, the generality of the non-blinkers' superior performance was tested using a task containing novel pictures rather than alphanumeric stimuli. A substantial AB was obtained in non-blinkers that was equivalent to that of 'blinkers'. Conclusion/Significance: The results suggest that non-blinkers employ an efficient target selection strategy that relies on well-learned alphabetic and numeric category sets.