Individual differences within and across attentional blink tasks revisited

Abstract

When the second of two targets (T2) is presented in close temporal proximity (within 200-500 ms) to the first (T1), the accuracy for reporting T2 is reduced relative to when the targets are separated by longer durations; this effect is known as the attentional blink (AB). Two recent studies have shown that individual differences in the magnitudes of the AB are stable both within a single testing session and over time. While one study found a large positive correlation between AB magnitudes when there was an attentional-set/task switch between T1 and T2 and when there was not, the other study found no relationship between the switch and no-switch paradigms. The present study was conducted to clarify this discrepancy by examining the reliability of, and relationships among, individual differences in AB performance on five different versions of the standard dual-target RSVP paradigm, three of which involved an attentional-set/task switch between T1 and T2, and two of which did not. Participants completed all five paradigms, and then returned 7-10 days later to again complete the same paradigms. The performance on all five versions was reliable both within and across testing sessions, demonstrating again that individual differences in AB performance are stable over time. In addition, all five AB versions were significantly intercorrelated, although the strengths of the relationships differed depending on the extent to which the T1 and T2 attentional sets/tasks overlapped. These findings provide evidence that multiple distinct dual-target RSVP tasks do share underlying variability, providing support for the use of different versions of the paradigm in the literature.

Effects of Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation over Left Dorsolateral pFC on the Attentional Blink Depend on Individual Baseline Performance

“…Given the unreliability of the priming measure, the fact that observed stimulation-induced changes in priming may simply reflect regression to the mean, and the fact that priming did not predict AB magnitude in a previous study (Slagter & Georgopoulou, 2013), we did not further examine if stimulation-induced changes in AB magnitude could be explained by stimulationinduced changes in distractor inhibition ability, as indexed by this priming measure. Importantly, baseline AB magnitude was reliably correlated between sessions (r(31) = .583, p < .001; controlling for session order), replicating previous reports that AB performance is stable over time (Dale et al, 2013).…”

“…Replicating previous reports, large individual differences in AB magnitude (Dale et al, 2013) and distractor inhibition (Slagter & Georgopoulou, 2013;Dux & Marois, 2008) were observed.…”

“…Furthermore, this finding suggests that differences in left DLPFC activation might contribute to individual differences in AB magnitude. One consistent observation in the literature is that individuals differ substantially in the size of their AB; some display a very big AB and almost always miss T2, whereas others virtually always detect T2 (i.e., display no AB; Martens, Munneke, Smid, & Johnson, 2006), with most individuals falling somewhere between these two extremes (Dale, Dux, & Arnell, 2013). Activity levels in left DLPFC may underlie these individual differences in AB magnitude and in target selection more generally.…”

Multiple measures of dispositional global/local bias predict attentional blink magnitude

“…The internal consistency reliability of the AB task was also assessed using the split-half procedure described above. The task was found to be moderately reliable, r = 0.52, and the reliability estimate was comparable to estimates obtained in a similar AB task by Dale, Dux, and Arnell (2013) and Dale and Arnell (2013b).…”

The Attentional Blink Impairs Detection and Delays Encoding of Visual Information: Evidence from Human Electrophysiology

“…Task-switching in RSVP designs is known to exacerbate AB effects (Kawahara, Zuvic, Enns, & Di Lollo, 2003), and this may be so because taskswitching is controlled by frontal areas partly overlapping with those underpinning the deployment of top-down attention to target information (e.g., Cutini et al, 2008;Dove, Pollmann, Schubert, Wiggins, & von Cramon, 2000). However, task-switching between T1 and T2 processing in the AB has been hypothesized to draw on distinct capacity limitations relative to those held to constitute the root cause of the AB (Dale, Dux, & Arnell, 2013;Kelly & Dux, 2011;see Visser, Bischof, & Di Lollo, 1999, for a review).…”