Distractor suppression when attention fails: behavioral evidence for a flexible selective attention mechanism.

ABSTRACT: Despite consistent evidence showing that attention is a multifaceted mechanism that can operate at multiple levels of processing depending on the structure and demands of the task, investigations of the attentional blink phenomenon have consistently shown that the impairment in reporting the second of two targets typically occurs at a late, or post-perceptual, stage of processing. This suggests that the attentional blink phenomenon may represent the operation of a unique attentional mechanism that is not as flexible as other attentional mechanisms. To test whether the attentional blink is a fixed or flexible phenomenon, we manipulated first target task demands (i.e., difficulty) and measured the influence this had on processing a subsequently presented distractor and the second target. If

SUBMITTER: Elliott JC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4411164 | biostudies-literature | 2015

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature