Two experiments examined the possibility that attention directed to a distractor during rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) can produce an attentional blink (AB). A to-be-ignored distractor (D1) preceded a target word (T2) by a variable lag in RSVP streams of black false-font distractors. D1 was highlighted by color and was a word, a string of consonants, a string of digits, or a string of false-font characters. Recall of T2 was significantly suppressed at short D1-T2 lags (the AB) but only when D1 contained letters; the AB was completely absent when D1 was composed of digits or false-font characters. Thus, the AB can be triggered by a highlighted distractor if the distractor shares features with a target.

The etiology of visual hallucinations is largely undetermined in schizophrenia. Collerton et al.'s PAD model partly concurs with what we know about neurocognition in schizophrenia, but we need to specify the types of perceptual and attentional abnormalities that are implicated in recurrent complex visual hallucinations (RCVH). Available data suggest that abnormal attentional control and top-down processing play a larger role than the ventral stream deficits.