Attentional Blink In Characters:Resource Depletion Or Temporary Loss Of Control

Usually it is difficult to obtain all the information of presented stimulations. For example, when a series of stimulating presented rapidly, you may ignored one part of the stimulus, or may be unaware of the person next to has already gone when you are concentrating on movies. Cognitive psychologists call the apparent attention ignorance attentional impairment. When two stimulus are followed by mask, T1 and T2 are presented within 600ms in succession .T1 can be reported correctly often, but it is difficult to report T2, this phenomenon is called Attentional Blink (AB). When the SOA (stimulus outset asynchrony) between T1 T2 is more than 600ms, subjects then can report T2 correctly gradually. The limited management of brain on stimulation presented in succession can be studied with the RSVP paradigm. In RSVP paradigm, letters, digits, words, pictures were presented in the same position ,the duration of each one is about 1/10 second. Subjects were required to identify one or more goal stimulus. Any of a single stimulus even presents only 100ms, also can accurately reported. However, studies have shown that when the intervals time in goal stimulus is very short, report the second goal stimulus is difficult. The researchers think AB phenomenon is not because of perception, memory or reaction output limits. They have put forward many theories to explain the AB, although in some extent mechanisms explain the special phenomenon are different, but all agreed that the focus attention on T1 left T2 attention resource lack, make T2 easily reduce or be replaced. Theoritical accounts of AB have relied on some form of liminted attentional resource, such as two-stage models, interference model, attentional dwell-time hypothesis, PRP model and so on. However Lollo Di advances a theory about temporary loss of control on attention input filter, that AB occurred because the distracters after the first target make filters become no longer suitable for the second target.In view of the differences between chinese and letters, I use characters as goal stimulus in RSVP paradigm and observed AB, and when the SOA between T1 and T2 is longer than 600ms,the percentage of accuracy of T2 is significantly higher than when the SOA is 200ms,300ms,400ms,500ms. But when T2 followed T1 presented, there is no significant deference between them; resource depletion is not available here. For further study on the mechanism of AB, in the second experiment, I adopt three characters as target stimulus, change target by the gap between the stimulus, compara the accuracy of T1, T2 and T3,and the comparative analysis between them, found that we can't use TLC theory or resource depletion theory alone to explain AB.Therefore, we think AB is not a unitary phenomenon, it is the result of multi-mechanism interaction.