Effects of phonological length on the attentional blink for words

The authors tested whether the attentional blink (AB), a deficit in the ability to report a second target appearing within half a second of a first target, may reflect limitations for consolidating visual stimuli into working memory and awareness. Previous research has shown that people are severely limited in the rate that they can identify and report visual events presented in rapid succession. Word length was examined, a variable known to affect verbal working memory. Experiment 1 showed that the AB was modulated by the phonological length of the first target. Phonologically longer pseudowords triggered larger blink deficits. Experiment 2 also demonstrated the word-length effect on the AB using real-world stimuli, anagrams, that controlled for low-level visual differences between conditions. These data support proposals that the AB reflects a difficulty in consolidating information into working memory. The attentional blink (AB) paradigm demonstrates the rate-limited nature of attention. The AB occurs when the task is to identify two targets presented within a stream of distractors (known as rapid serial visual presentation [RSVP]). Attention devoted to the first target (Tl) compromises the ability to identify the second target (T2) if it appears within a half second of Tl, demonstrating that there are severe limitations in the number of items that we can consciously perceive within a second's tim