Abstract
When two targets are embedded in a temporal stream of distractors, second-target identification is initially impaired and then gradually improves as inter-target interval lengthens (attentional blink; AB). Notably, in about half of the published studies, this deficit is partially ameliorated when the targets follow one another directly, a condition known as “lag-1 sparing”. Here, we probe the impact of target-distractor similarity on lag-1 sparing, with the surprising finding that while high similarity impairs second-target accuracy at all subsequent lags, it actually improves accuracy when the targets follow one another directly. We suggest that this improvement reflects the positive influence of over-committing resources to target processing in the AB.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by an Early Career Research Grant from the University of Melbourne, a Discovery Grant from the Australian Research Council, and seed funding from the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. Portions of the findings were reported at the 45th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Minneapolis, MN, November 2004. The authors wish to thank several anonymous reviewers, Chris Olivers, and Fabio Ferlazzo for their helpful comments on previous versions of this manuscript.
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Visser, T.A.W., Davis, C. & Ohan, J.L. When similarity leads to sparing: probing mechanisms underlying the attentional blink. Psychological Research 73, 327–335 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-008-0155-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-008-0155-5