title: Summary statistics in the attentional blink.
abstract: We used the attentional blink (AB) paradigm to investigate the processing stage at which extraction of summary statistics from visual stimuli ("ensemble coding") occurs. Experiment 1 examined whether ensemble coding requires attentional engagement with the items in the ensemble. Participants performed two sequential tasks on each trial: gender discrimination of a single face (T1) and estimating the average emotional expression of an ensemble of four faces (or of a single face, as a control condition) as T2. Ensemble coding was affected by the AB when the tasks were separated by a short temporal lag. In Experiment 2, the order of the tasks was reversed to test whether ensemble coding requires more working-memory resources, and therefore induces a larger AB, than estimating the expression of a single face. Each condition produced a similar magnitude AB in the subsequent gender-discrimination T2 task. Experiment 3 additionally investigated whether the previous results were due to participants adopting a subsampling strategy during the ensemble-coding task. Contrary to this explanation, we found different patterns of performance in the ensemble-coding condition and a condition in which participants were instructed to focus on only a single face within an ensemble. Taken together, these findings suggest that ensemble coding emerges automatically as a result of the deployment of attentional resources across the ensemble of stimuli, prior to information being consolidated in working memory.
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, 2006, Australia. nicolasmcnair@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Nicolas A
authors.initials: NA
authors.lastname: McNair
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, 2006, Australia.|School of Psychological Sciences, University of Melbourne, Parkville, 3010, Victoria, Australia.
authors.forename: Patrick T
authors.initials: PT
authors.lastname: Goodbourn
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, 2006, Australia.
authors.forename: Lauren T
authors.initials: LT
authors.lastname: Shone
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, 2006, Australia.
authors.forename: Irina M
authors.initials: IM
authors.lastname: Harris
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000818:Animals; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D054518:Attentional Blink / Q000502:physiology*; D005149:Facial Expression; D000066499:Facial Recognition / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008570:Memory, Short-Term / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Attentional blink; Ensemble coding; Visual perception