Varying T1 difficulty influences a cross-modal attentional blink
Marieke van der Hoeven, TNO Human factors, Human Interfaces
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.
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