Attentional blink session

Participants searched for four red target letters in rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP). On each trial, targets were consecutive or interleaved with distractors, and RSVP speed was slow or fast (7.5 or 12 Hz). Green distractors were also letters in one experiment, but digits in another. More targets were reported when distractors were digits than letters, speed was slow than fast, targets were consecutive than interleaved. More important, an attentional blink (AB: a sharp reduction in report probability from the first to subsequent targets) was absent in all but one condition -- fast RSVP, interleaved targets, and letter distractors -- and its occurrence was attributed to intrusions from interleaved distractors. Conclusions: an attention window is much wider in the present than conventional AB task; attention-gated distractors affect target processing in working memory only if they share target-defining features (e.g., category membership)