Abstract
In this set of five rapid serial visual presentation experiments, observers identified one or two target letters that were embedded in a stream of distractors. Target contrasts were varied, and their effects on the attentional blink (AB) were examined. Target identification improved when its contrast was increased. But whereas an increase in the first target’s (T1) contrast facilitated its identification, the recovery of the second target (T2) was paradoxically hampered (Experiments 2 and 5). Similarly, identification of the target suffered when the preceding singleton’s contrast was increased (Experiment 1). The AB was eliminated by inserting a blank after a low-contrast, but not a high-contrast, T1 (Experiment 5). Increasing T2’s contrast attenuated the blink (Experiment 3) and compensated the larger AB caused by a high-contrast T1 (Experiment 4). In all, these results showed that attention continued to be engaged as long as the target’s contrast prolonged its perceptibility. When the high-contrast target was T1, a larger AB was produced; when it was T2, there was protection from substitution masking.
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This research was supported by Grant R-107-000-042-112 from the National University of Singapore. Portions of this work were presented at the 24th European Conference of Visual Perception in Kusadasi, Turkey.
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Chua, F.K. The effect of target contrast on the attentional blink. Perception & Psychophysics 67, 770–788 (2005). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03193532
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03193532