Personal names do not always survive the attentional blink: Behavioral evidence for a flexible locus of selection

Abstract

Models of the attentional blink phenomenon (AB) typically assume that unattended information is processed to the post-perceptual level prior to selection for access to consciousness. The present experiments test this assumption by manipulating the perceptual load of the first target task (T1) and whether the second target (T2) was the participant's own name or someone else's name. In three experiments, increasing T1-load increased the severity of the AB for personal names. The results suggest that selection during the AB is not fixed at the post-perceptual stage, but rather the stage at which selection occurs during the AB is flexible.

Figure 1

A schematic representation of the trial sequence. In the trial depicted T1 load is high.

Figure 2

Mean proportion of correct T1 responses observed in Experiment 1 plotted as a function of T1-load and T2-name. Error bars represent the standard error of the mean (Loftus & Masson, 1994).

Figure 3

Mean proportion of correct T2 responses given correct identification of T1 (T2|T1) observed in Experiment 1 plotted as a function of the number of tasks, T1-load, T2-name, and T1-T2 lag. For comparison purposes, the scale of the x-axis depicting T1-T2 lag is the same in all figures. For the purposes of clarity stemming from the fact that the standard error of the mean is smaller than the figure symbols, in this and subsequent line-graphs a single error bar is plotted in the lower right of each panel. This single error bar represents +/− one standard error of the mean calculated based on the ANOVA error term for highest level interaction shown in the figure (Loftus & Masson, 1994). In Figure 3, the error bar calculation was based on the four-way interaction between the number of tasks, T1-load, T2-name, and T1-T2 lag.

Figure 4

Mean proportion AB magnitude in Experiment 1 plotted as a function of T1-load and T2-name.

Figure 5

Results of Experiment 2. Panel A: Mean proportion of correct T1 responses plotted as a function of T1-load and T2-name. Panel B: Mean proportion of correct T2|T1 responses in plotted as a function of T1-load, T2-name, and T1-T2 lag. Panel C: Mean proportion AB magnitude plotted as a function of T1-load and T2-name.

Figure 6

Results of Experiment 3. Panel A: Mean proportion of correct T1 responses in plotted as a function of T1-load and T2-name. Panel B: Mean proportion of correct T2 responses plotted as a function of T1-load, T2-name, and T1-T2 lag. Because the main effect of name was large, but did not interact with lag or the number of dots, the y-axes are different, but cover the same range so as to facilitate comparison of the effect of dots and lag. Panel C: Mean AB magnitude plotted as a function of T1-load and T2-name.