title: Paying attention to meaning.
abstract: Several paradigms show that responses to one event compromise responses to a second event for around 500 ms. Such effects are generally attributed to attentional capacity limitations associated with processing information in the first event. In a task in which targets could be distinguished only by their meaning, we varied the semantic relationship between distractors and targets following at different lags. Semantic relatedness alone produced a classic attentional blink. We conclude by discussing how attention theory might best accommodate these new effects.
authors.affiliation: MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge, England. philip.barnard@mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk
authors.forename: P J
authors.initials: PJ
authors.lastname: Barnard
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Scott
authors.forename: J
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Taylor
authors.forename: J
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: May
authors.forename: W
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Knightley
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention; D006801:Humans; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D012660:Semantics; D014825:Vocabulary