The influence of pretarget distracter stream properties on the skeletal attentional blink

The attentional blink (AB) occurs when the limits of temporal processing are reached. In a typical AB experiment, two targets (T1, T2) are presented within a stream of distracters, and detection of T2 is impaired when presented shortly after T1. Several theories focus on the mechanism underlying this deficit, among them proposals that see the similarity between distracters and targets as a crucial factor. The present study aimed to gain a better understanding of the effect of distracter stream properties on performance in the AB paradigm. A skeletal AB task was combined with a pretarget distracter stream. The presence and familiarity of the distracter stream and its similarityto the targets were manipulated in three separate experiments. The last distracter before T1 was sufficient to impair T1 detection in the standard rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) paradigm. Second, T2|T1 performance was impaired by an RSVP stream with low target-distracter similarity but unfamiliar stimuli. Finally, a single mask before T1 was shown to impair T2|T1. The results suggest that it is the last distracter before T1, rather than the RSVP stream per se, that impairs T1 detection performance. T2|T1 performance is influenced by a combination of transient attentional capture mechanisms that include but are not limited to target-distracter similarity. Thus, the size of an AB is determined not only by target-distracter similarity but by the overall processing demands of the distracters.