Dissociating the effects of featural and conceptual interference on multiple target processing in rapid serial visual presentation

Abstract

Attentional blink (AB) describes the finding that, when subjects attend to a specified target in a rapidly presented visual stream, they show a decreased ability to process a subsequent probe item for up to 600 msec. In the present study, the roles of featural and conceptual interference in the processing of targets and probes in a rapid serial visual presentation stream were examined. In Experiment 1, featurally more complex T+1 items produced larger AB even when the physical energy of the stimulus (e.g., the number of pixels) was held constant. In Experiment 2, the conceptual category of the T+1 item affected target identification but not AB magnitude. These results suggest that featural interference is a major determinant of AB magnitude, whereas featural and conceptual interference both affect target identification.