T1 difficulty affects the AB: manipulating T1 word frequency and T1 orthographic neighbor frequency.
Colored target words were presented with distractor nonwords in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task. In Experiment 1, the attentional blink (AB) effect on T2 accuracy was larger when T1 was a difficult (low-frequency) word than when it was a high-frequency word. In Experiment 2 the effect of T1 frequency on the AB was replicated in a between-participants design, and the frequency of T1's one-letter different neighbors (e.g., case, bare, for care) interacted with T1 frequency in its effects on T2 accuracy. Experiment 3 confirmed the effect of T1 frequency over 6 T1-T2 lags. The effects of T1 characteristics were sensitively assessed in the AB and were more consistent with resource depletion theories than control-process accounts.
School of Psychology, University of Queensland, QLD 4072, Brisbane, Australia. j.burt@psy.uq.edu.au
Jennifer S
JS
Burt
Samantha
S
Howard
Emmaline K
EK
Falconer
D001244:Association; D054518:Attentional Blink; D003118:Color Perception; D006801:Humans; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D011930:Reaction Time; D011932:Reading; D012660:Semantics; D012691:Serial Learning