Priming T2 in a Visual and Auditory Attentional Blink Task

Participants performed an attentional blink (AB) task including digits as targets and letters as distractors within the visual and auditory domains. Prior to the rapid serial visual presentation, a visual or auditory prime was presented in the form of a digit that was identical to the second target (T2) on 50% of the trials. In addition to the "classic" AB effect, an overall drop in performance on T2 was observed for the trials on which the stream was preceded by an identical prime from the same modality. No cross-modal priming was evident, suggesting that the observed inhibitory priming effects are modality specific. We argue that the present findings represent a special type of negative priming operating at a low feature level. Copyright 2008 Psychonomic Society, Inc