Colloquium: Different attentional blink tasks reflect distinct information processing limitations: An individual differences approach

To study the temporal dynamics and capacity-limits of attentional selection and encoding researchers often employ the attentional blink (AB) phenomenon: subjects’ impaired ability to report the second of two targets in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) stream they appear within 200-500ms of one another. The AB has now been the subject of hundreds of scientific investigations and a variety of different dual- target RSVP paradigms have been employed to study this failure of consciousness. The three most common are those where targets are defined categorically from distractors, those where target definition is based on featural information and those where there is a set switch between T1 and T2 with the first target typically being featurally defined and T2 requiring a detection or discrimination judgement (probe task). An almost universally held assumption across all AB theories is that these three tasks measure the same deficit, however here, using an individual differences approach, we demonstrate that AB magnitude is only related across categorical and featural tasks. Thus, these paradigms appear to reflect a distinct cognitive limitation from that observed under set- switch conditions.