The roles of location specificity and masking mechanisms in the attentional blink

Abstract

In a series of four experiments using rapid serial visual presentations of two target letters embedded in numeral distractors, with different numbers of display positions and with or without masking, we show that (1) the nonmonotonic, U-shaped attentional blink (AB) function, which occurs when all items are presented at the same display location, is eliminated in favor of a monotonic function when targets and distractors are presented randomly dispersed over four or nine adjacent positions; (2) the AB monotonicity is maintained with the spatially distributed presentation even when backward masks are used in all possible stimulus positions and when the location of the next item in sequence is predictable; and (3) the U-shaped AB is not due to position-specific forward or backward masking effects occurring at early levels of visual processing. We tentatively conclude that the U-shaped AB is primarily a function of the interruption of late visual processing produced when the item following the first target occurs at the same location. In order for the AB to severely disrupt performance, the item following the first target must be presented at the same location as the target so that it can serve both as a distractor and as a mask interrupting or interfering with subsequent visual processing.