Method Article

A Dual Task Procedure Combined with Rapid Serial Visual Presentation to Test Attentional Blink for Nontargets

DOI:

10.3791/52374

December 5th, 2014

In This Article

Summary

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This paper describes a novel dual task procedure combined with Rapid Serial Visual Presentation to look at attentional blink at varied stimulus onset asynchronies. This experimental procedure differed from others in that it tested attentional blink for nontargets.

Abstract

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When viewers search for targets in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) stream, if two targets are presented within about 500 msec of each other, the first target may be easy to spot but the second is likely to be missed. This phenomenon of attentional blink (AB) has been widely studied to probe the temporal capacity of attention for detecting visual targets. However, with the typical procedure of AB experiments, it is not possible to examine how the processing of non-target items in RSVP may be affected by attention. This paper describes a novel dual task procedure combined with RSVP to test effects of AB for nontargets at varied stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs). In an exemplar experiment, a target category was first displayed, followed by a sequence of 8 nouns. If one of the nouns belonged to the target category, participants would respond ‘yes’ at the end of the sequence, otherwise participants would respond ‘no’. Two 2-alternative forced choice memory tasks followed the response to determine if participants remembered the words immediately before or after the target, as well as a random word from another part of the sequence. In a second exemplar experiment, the same design was used, except that 1) the memory task was counterbalanced into two groups with SOAs of either 120 or 240 msec and 2) three memory tasks followed the sequence and tested remembrance for nontarget nouns in the sequence that could be anywhere from 3 items prior the target noun position to 3 items following the target noun position. Representative results from a previously published study demonstrate that our procedure can be used to examine divergent effects of attention that not only enhance targets but also suppress nontargets. Here we show results from a representative participant that replicated the previous finding. 

Introduction

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Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) has been used to show that there is an attentional blink (AB) when two targets are presented sequentially within about 500 msec1. If the second target is presented within about 150 msec, however, there is enhancement in the processing of both targets (e.g., lag-1 sparing)2. A similar phenomenon has been found in spatial attention studies. Both the biased competition model of selective attention3 and the normalization model of attention4 suggest that attention enhances the processing of items presented in the attended location but suppresses the processing of nearby items. Coul....

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Protocol

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NOTE: All subjects must give informed written consent before the experimental protocol. All procedures, consent forms, and the experimental protocol must be approved by the local Committee for the Protection of Human Subjects.

1. Preparing the Subject for the Experiment

  1. Recruit participants from the local area and compensate them for their time. The participants must have normal or corrected-to-normal visual acuity and English as their first language.

2. Stimuli

  1. Choose at least seven different categories from Battig and Montague9 to use in the target detection task explai....

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Results

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For experiment 1, the representative subject’s accuracy for detecting a noun in the target category over SOAs was 72% at 120 msec, 91% at 240 msec, and 94% for 360 msec. For the memory task, only correctly answered trials of the target detection task were used, and trials were separated based on the presence or absence of a categorical target noun and then split into subsets based on their positions corresponding to the target noun, or their serial positions corresponding to the decoy target noun in target absent trials........

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Discussion

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This novel dual-task approach combined a categorical RSVP detection task with two-alternative forced choice memory tasks immediately following the detection task. Our representative results replicate a previously published study8, showing that target detection may impair memory encoding of nontargets that are presented after the target, especially at the lag-2 position in RSVP. At a glance, this is an effect similar to AB with lag-1 sparing that suggests transient attention modulated by target detection8<.......

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Disclosures

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The authors have nothing to disclose.

Acknowledgements

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The authors have no acknowledgements.

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Materials

List of materials used in this article
NameCompanyCatalog NumberComments
Dell CRT MonitorDell Inc.P113021-inch, refresh rate = 85 Hz, resolution = 1,280 x 1,024 pixels, 16 bits color depth
Apple Macintosh ComputerApple Inc.A1278
MATLABThe MathWorks Inc.R2009b
Psychophysics Toolbox for MATLABPTB-3This toolbox is used to present stimuli and collect behavioral data.

References

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  1. Raymond, J. E., Shapiro, K. L., Arnell, K. M. Temporary suppression of visual processing in an RSVP task: An attentional blink. J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform. 18 (3), 849-860 (1992).
  2. Dux, P. E., Marois, R. The attentional blink: A review of data ....

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Tags

Attentional BlinkRapid Serial Visual PresentationDual Task ProcedureNon target WordsStimulus Onset AsynchronyMemory TaskTarget DetectionCognitive NeuroscienceVisual AttentionExperimental Paradigm

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