Dissociable Mechanisms Supporting Awareness: The P300 and Gamma in a Linguistic Attentional Blink Task

As demonstrated by the attentional blink (AB) phenomenon, awareness for attended stimuli is governed by sharp capacity limits. We used a linguistic AB task to investigate the neural mechanisms that underlie failures of awareness, examining both event-related potentials and oscillatory brain activity to correctly reported and missed second targets (T2s) presented after a correctly reported first target (T1) in a rapid visual stream of distractors. Correctly reported targets occurring at a short lag (250 ms) after T1-within the classic AB period-elicited enhanced late gamma activity relative to incorrectly reported targets but showed no P300 modulation relative to missed targets. In contrast, correctly reported targets presented at a long lag (830 ms)-outside the classic AB period-elicited a greater P300 component but did not significantly modulate oscillatory activity. This double dissociation suggests that there are multiple neural mechanisms supporting awareness that may operate in parallel. Either the P300 or the gamma can index impairment in the cascade of processing leading to a target's entry into awareness. We conclude that the P300 and gamma activity reflect functionally distinct neural mechanisms, each of which plays an independent role in awareness.