Varying T1 difficulty influences a cross-modal attentional blink
Poster Presentation

Marieke van der Hoeven
TNO Human factors, Human Interfaces

Florence Kleberg
TNO Human factors, Human interfaces

Adelbert Bronkhorst
TNO Human factors, Human Interfaces

     Abstract ID Number: 93
     Full text: Not available
     Last modified: March 17, 2006
     Presentation date: 06/19/2006 4:00 PM in Hamilton Building, Foyer
     (View Schedule)

Abstract
The attentional blink (AB) is a deficit in reporting a second target (T2), when two targets are presented closely in time (200-500ms) in a rapid serial presentation. Different studies showed that this deficit appears not only in visual but also in auditory and cross-modal conditions. In the present study we investigate if the cross-modal AB is influenced by the difficulty of T1. We presented subjects a RSVP (rapid serial visual presentation) containing a visual first target (T1) and a synchronous RSAP (Rapid serial auditory presentation) containing an auditory T2 (a spoken letter). First target difficulty was varied by presenting 3 letter-words, 3 letter-pseudowords, 3 letters, or 3 symbols. Results show that there is indeed a cross-modal AB when T1 is a word or consists of 3 letters, whereby the magnitude of the AB is significantly larger for letters than for words. No AB was found.when T1 was a pseudoword. Unfortunately, no clear results were obtained for the condition with symbols as first targets because T1 scores were very low. We conclude that there is indeed a cross-modal attentional bottleneck, influenced by the difficulty of T1.