Individual differences in the attentional blink. The important role of irrelevant information.

A well-established phenomenon in the study of attention is the attentional blink (AB): a deficit in reporting the second of two targets when it occurs 200-500 ms after the first. Although the effect has been shown to be robust in a wide variety of task conditions, we recently reported that some individuals show little or no AB, and presented psychophysiological evidence that target processing differs in nonblinkers (who do not show an AB) and blinkers (who do show an AB). Here we present evidence that the level of distractor processing and subsequent interference with target identification processes also differs between the two groups. In one task, two masked targets were centrally presented at varying temporal intervals, with or without additional distractors. In a second task, the masked targets were presented eccentrically, with or without the presence of a central sequential stream of the task-irrelevant distractors. In both cases, the presence of distractors led to an increased AB magnitude in blinkers, whereas performance for nonblinkers remained relatively unaffected. The results thus support the hypothesis that nonblinkers are more efficient in ignoring irrelevant information than blinkers.

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