Training and the Attentional Blink: Limits Overcome or Expectations Raised? M Tang, D Badcock, T Visser |
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School of Psychology, University of Western Australia, Australia
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| The attentional blink (AB) refers to a deficit in reporting the second of two sequentially presented targets when separated by less than 500 ms. Two decades of research suggest the AB is a robust phenomenon that is likely attributable to structural or capacity limits in visual processing. This assumption, however, has recently been undermined by a demonstration that the AB could be eliminated after only a few hundred training trials [Choi, Chang, Shibata, Sasaki and Watanabe, 2012, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 109(30), 12242-12247]. The present work examined whether training benefited performance directly by eliminating processing limitations as claimed or indirectly by creating expectations about when targets would appear. Consistent with the latter option, when temporal expectations were eliminated training did not eliminate the AB. These results suggest that while training may ameliorate the AB indirectly, processing limits evidenced in the AB cannot be eliminated simply by repeated exposure to the task. |
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